“Our primary goal was to shed light on Beethoven’s health problems, which famously include progressive hearing loss, beginning in his mid- to late-20s and eventually leading to him being functionally deaf by 1818.”
“My proposal is simply this: Every high school and college theater program in Florida and Tennessee should be putting on [Twelfth Night]. So should every community theater in those states and in every other state where grandstanding demagogues are pretending that policing gender conformity is something that elected officials are entitled to do.”
I started reading Agatha Christie novels as a high school student in the 80s, and even I at that unenlightened time recognized that her novels were filled with problematic language, even if I would have not had the language back then to describe them as such. Anyway, I don’t have any problem with “sensitivity edits” on her books.
“Which is to say that for many people, working from home is not a comfortable pullback enabled by prosperity but a frantic necessity in its absence.”
Those images of the Pope in a puffy white jacket are total AI fakes. But they’re realistic enough to fool a lot of people.
“Android apps digitally signed by China’s third-biggest e-commerce company exploited a zero-day vulnerability that allowed them to surreptitiously take control of millions of end-user devices to steal personal data and install malicious apps”.
If you’re banning Dolly Parton songs, you’re out of touch with the mainstream.
“As always, dignity loss, the capacity to absorb humiliation, is Kevin McCarthy’s super power.”
“A mammoth meatball has been created by a cultivated meat company, resurrecting the flesh of the long-extinct animals.” My dream of someday eating a brontosaurus burger draws ever closer.
RIP, Bobbi Ercoline, school nurse and mother of two whose image was immortalized on the cover of Woodstock’s live album.
“People like cutting spending in theory. They do not like it when you cut specific things — and especially the big stuff that could actually put a dent in the deficit.”
“The value that Twitter’s platform produced, by combining valuable streams of qualification and curiosity, is being beaten and wrung out. What’s left has — for months now — felt like an echo-y shell of its former self. And it’s clear that with every freshly destructive decision — whether it’s unbanning the nazis and letting the toxicity rip, turning verification into a pay-to-play megaphone or literally banning journalists — Musk has applied his vast wealth to destroying as much of the information network’s value as possible in as short a time as possible; each decision triggering another exodus of expertise as more long-time users give up and depart.”
“GitHub has until April 3 to unmask the hooligan(s) that uploaded pieces of the Twitter source code to the GitHub repository.”
“As we await rulings this term that could gut the already battered Voting Rights Act, weaken laws protecting the LGBTQ community, and eviscerate affirmative action in college admissions, the court teed up a new target for next term: the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
“Ahead of an expected state takeover, the Walt Disney Co. quietly pushed through the pact and restrictive covenants that would tie the hands of future board members for decades, according to a legal presentation by the district’s lawyers on Wednesday.” “Disney Pantsed DeSantis” is the TL;dr version of this. This thread, which notes that the outgoing RCID board approved the changes and recorded them with Orange County before the Florida legislature passed the anti-Disney bill, is a great explainer. And while that first story says this happened “quietly”, the truth is that everything Disney did was done in public, in plain sight, over the course of months, following the letter of state open records law. No one on Team DeSantis noticed or took action if they did.
RIP, Russell Washington, founder of the Houston-based record label Bigtyme Recordz.
RIP, Mark Russell, piano-playing PBS political satirist.
“If I were, say, running for township representative here in Darke County, Ohio and paid hush money to an inconvenient sex partner in a way that invited legal scrutiny, and the local DA (whose politics, I assure you, largely run counter to mine) found out, I would 100% not be surprised to be hauled up under an indictment. Because that’s actually how the law is meant to work. You either believe no one is above the law, or you don’t. Former presidents of the United States are no more above the law then I am, or you are, or any of us is.”
RIP, Leo D. Sullivan, pioneering Black animator and co-founder of the first Black-owned animation production company.
“A brief timeline of recent presidential criming”.
Rest in peace Russell Washington. You were a blessing to so many even when you were hustling at King’s years ago, your acts of kindness will be forever remembered.
Mother Jones should be ashamed of itself for writing a puff piece about lab meat when the climate change costs to produce it at scale are unknown but likely ginormous, as the electricity use alone will be mammoth. (Pun semi-intended.)
That said, no way you’re getting meat protein samples from a dinosaur to create a lab meat brontoburger, Kuff.
@Socratic- I will venture to say that you have no idea how much energy it will take to produce lab meat at scale, nor does anyone at this point. Evolution can be observed as changes in protein sequences over time, and this process can be run in reverse. Since we have living dinosaurs present now, i. e. birds, the protein sequences of brontosaurus meat could be guessed at. Since chickens, which are dinosaurs, have become less and less tasty in my lifetime, I imagine that running the evolution clock backwards will result in a might tasty bronto burger indeed.