Articles by BoingBoing from December 2018

DeVotchKa's latest album, This Night Falls Forever, has been on near constant rotation in our home since I picked it up a few weeks ago. As usual, the band's music is heartrendingly beautiful. Straigh...

Apparently, this story popped up back in 2015, but it's so cool that it's still worth reading about now: the city of Portland, Oregon has water pipes buried underneath of it that not only carry clean ...

2018 has been a dangerous year for those who bring us the news: according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 129 journalists were killed this year. For the first time in history, the United Stat...

The Marxist Society of Peking University were getting ready to celebrate Mao's 125th birthday when the university administration abruptly deposed its leader, Qui Zhanxuan, and replaced the Society's l...

Writing in The Art Newspaper, Andrea Marechal Watson enumerates the up- and down-sides of keeping your millions in art treasures aboard your super-yacht: on the one hand, the full-time crew of up to 5...

Scratch creator Mitchel Resnick -- head of the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindgergarten Group -- writes, "Until now, Scratch has been developed by my research group at the MIT Media Lab. In the coming y...

President Barack Obama released his annual list of favorite books, movies, and songs on his Facebook page yesterday. Remember when we had an intellectually and culturally curious president who did thi...

Just now, I tried to recall what I had for lunch the other day. I had to wrestle with it for a few moments before I was able to pin a chicken chimichanga at Espi & T's to the mat for a ten-count. ...

Teslas now have built-in "whoopie cushions" thanks to a new firmware update. The vehicles can now make farting noises on demand or by use of a turn signal with what they're cheekily calling, "Emission...

This director's commentary of the bizarre Kevin Spacey video that heralded his being charged with felony indecent assault and battery this week doesn't explain what in the hell Spacey was thinking whe...

Between September and December, I collaborated with science fiction writer and Renaissance historian Ada Palmer and science historian Adrian Johns on a series of interdisciplinary seminars on "Censors...

John Picerne is a hereditary one-percenter whose contribution to his family legacy of "real estate development" was to spend millions on lobbying, which landed him millions more in government loans ea...

This week, on the same day, I had not one but two friends tell me about designer Sonia Harris' "swearing patterns." Of course, I instantly became a fan. Her hidden-in-plain-sight patterns are subversi...

Reddit user Sneegles spotted the unpleasant clown, Pennywise, from Stephen King's It hiding in a rug pattern. Pattern in rug looks like Pennywise from r/mildlyinteresting Read the rest...

There's a not-to-be missed profile in High Country News on Din heavy metal bands on and around the Navajo Nation in Arizona, with incredible photos by Clarke Tolton, who also directed the video above....

I'm feeling sad for humanity. "Selfie wrist" is a thing. According to CBSNewYork, San Francisco doctor Levi Harrison is seeing a rise in an injury caused by "hyper-flexing your wrist inwards to captur...

Paul Peralta, the general manager of the Portland Doubletree where Jermaine Massey, 34, was racially harassed, apologized today.In a statement released on Friday, Peralta said, we sincerely apologize ...

If the government shutdown extends beyond New Year's Day, Donald Trump's political tantrum will close the Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo in Washington, DC, among many other sites important t...

Hollywood would have you believe that if you lived during medieval times and didn't have the good fortune to be born into a noble family, you were forced to survive by eating thin soup, gruel and the ...

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg on Friday: proud of the progress we've made. Yes, they really are that deluded.In his post on Facebook today, the Facebook CEO said some of the company's problems with misin...

In a year-in-review post, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday he is proud of the progress we've made. Yes, he really is that deluded.I wonder what would have to happen for Zuckerberg to _not_ be...

Nearly 800,000 people are hurting financially because of the government shutdown, according to NBC: 420,000 federal employees must continue to work without a paycheck until the shutdown ends, and anot...

The Trump administration is advising people who work for the federal government, who are not getting paid due to Trump's stupid government shutdown tantrum, to literally *barter with their landlords* ...

Over at Cool Tools, Kevin Kelly reviews over 40 YouTube video channels by makers, experimenters, and explainers. It's a great list. I'm subscribing to all the ones I haven't already subscribed to.I ha...

In 2002, a mysterious man is arrested for illegally occupying a hotel room: he says his name is Ed Stone, and that he was kidnapped by aliens from the same hotel room in 1931 and has just been returne...

While mass-shootings are the most visible and spectacular consequence of America's love affair with guns, the person most likely to shoot you is you (either accidentally or deliberately), with a loved...

This pet recovery collar stops my dog from licking where I do not want, and has caused zero damage or calamity to my home.My Great Pyrenees has some pretty massive surgery scheduled. Insanely, he got ...

Filmmakers turned a writing prompt from Reddit user WaFromWa into a stellar short film whose premise includes Santa as a deadly, covert super-assassin. Superb! (via JWZ) Read the rest...

In 2013, San Bernardino Sheriffs Deputy Luis Ortiz took the decision to arrest a group of seventh grade girls -- 12 and 13 year olds -- because they wouldn't speak when he demanded to know who among t...

Classic games, computers and gaming consoles are a source of joy for those who came of age when the titles and hardware were cutting edge commodities. Few things can transport you back to your youth f...

Macaulay Culkin's middle name is currently "Carson." But, starting in 2019, it will be "Macaulay Culkin," as in Macaulay 'Macaulay Culkin' Culkin.The Home Alone actor has been polling his fans on what...

It hasn't been a good year for Apple. The company's had to confirm that they've been throttling speeds of older iPhones to maintain battery efficiency. They were caught throttling their latest MacBook...

Remember earlier this week when Trump asked a child over the phone, "Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at seven it's marginal, right?"? Who could forget?!Well, the parents of seven-year-old C...

This is quite the feat. Twitter user @pilotviruet's mom crocheted her a playable Monopoly game blanket. Color me impressed!hello, please look at this giant blanket my mom crocheted for me!!! pic.twitt...

Since it turned out the glitter bomb bait box was a hoax, I've finally accepted that nothing online is real. But this sure does look like a video of a porch pirate getting his ass ran down and beaten,...

These "Delete my Browser History" medic alert bracelets are making the rounds again and some say they can be a hassle for first responders and other emergency medical professionals. This redditor, ...

"One of my all-time favorites, it's a peaty, smokey, delicious experience if you appreciate peat, and it's totally disgusting if you don't like peat," says foodquig, as his wife leaves him. [via r/vid...

Here we go again. This Sesame Street sound bite is being called the new Yanny/Laurel. In the clip, Grover says, "Yes, yes, that sounds like an excellent idea." But people are hearing, "Yes, yes, thats...

A man who until recently worked as Santa Claus at a Georgia Walmart has been arrested after the bodies of his two children were found buried in his backyard, say authorities.Elwyn Crocker's two childr...

Hundreds of Nicaraguans who took to the streets over the last eight months to protest President Daniel Ortega's corrupt government have been forced into hiding and, in some cases, to flee the country ...

As is the case every year Maximum Fun's Jesse Thorn has posted a special episode (MP3) of the Bullseye podcast, anthologizing excerpts from the best comedy albums of the year. Here's this year's contr...

Millitext is a font whose glyphs are just one pixel wide. It depends on a clever exploitation of how subpixels -- the individual red, green and blue lights of an LCD display -- are triggered by certai...

For anyone who hasn't read Ready Player One or Dark Matter, you can get them as Kindle edition books today at greatly reduced prices, along with many other titles. Read the rest...

Jermaine Massey took a seat in a quiet section of the Doubletree hotel lobby he was staying at in Portland to take a call from his mother. But he says he was soon interrupted by a security guard Ear...

The dead leaf butterfly looks exactly like a decomposing brown leaf.Some of the best mimicry I've ever seen https://t.co/bMGhei6zj1 (from https://t.co/X5ZDxl2QZK) pic.twitter.com/DAto7SWR7H—...

An hour-and-a-half episode of Black Mirror, called "Bandersnatch," debuts on Netflix tomorrow. From the description: "In 1984, a young programmer begins to question reality as he adapts a sprawling fa...

Pyramid schemes are appealing if you don't understand how they work. This video explains how they work, why they are unsustainable, and the psychological tricks used to recruit victims. Read the rest...

Until the early 2000s more people lived in villages and small towns than in cities. Population in large cities continues to rise, while the opposite is true in rural areas. This is especially true in ...

The Action Lab Man presented a video of cracking glass using a camera capable of filming 10 million frames per second. Glass cracks propagate faster than a bullet, so even at 10 millions frames a seco...

A long-chewed-on mystery about Michael Cohen's activities in the Trump-Russia conspiracy may now be resolved, thanks to data leaked by Cohen's cellphone. Operational security will get you every time, ...

Eve (AKA Talismana Designs) carves these $32 bird skull rings out of slaughterhouse surplus cow-bones, custom carved to your size. (via Creepbay) Read the rest...

Juul just handed out $2 billion in dividends, making 1,500 employees into overnight millionaires; the cash came from Altria-Marlboro's 35%, $12.8 billion buyout of the company -- and everything about ...

This girl, trapped in a church, finds a way to escape the Sinners Prayer by doing the Macarena. Read the rest...

After a successful phishing attack that captured over 50 accounts, hackers stole 500,000 records from the San Diego Unified School District, for staff, current students, and past students going all th...

Lots of folks continue to build fabulous creations out of LEGO well into adulthood. Others tire of it, as they do many of their other childhood belongings, at an early age. Both are fine. What's not O...

Techcrunch's Greg Kumparak started agitating for phones to have standard 3.5mm jacks in the 2000s, rejoicing when the original Iphone shipped with one; now, two years after Apple took away the phone j...

Generally, the DNC is a fucking pro-establishment dumpster fire (which may explain why it's foundering), but things are (finally) looking up.The DNC has announced a new rule for participating in the p...

ORG -- the UK Open Rights Group (disclosure: I am a co-founder and volunteers on its advisory board) is hiring a Data and Democracy Project Officer: "responsible for delivering our work on preserving ...

Why install doors at the bottom of each coal cart when you can simply tip the entire train upside-down? Read the rest...

For close to two thousand years, holy men from across the wide spectrum of the Christianity have rocked a completely or entirely shaved head--a hairstyle called a tonsure. A tonsure marked those that ...

J Salmern, a Netherlands-based concert photographer, took a fantastic shot of Arch Enemy singer Alissa White-Gluz at a festival gig in Nijmegen. He posted it to his Instagram, to White-Gluz and fans' ...

Thailand's got a reputation with being less than cool with illegal drugs being brought into their country or used within their national borders. Which drugs are legal and which are disallowed changes ...

Dale a tu cuerpo alegra. Read the rest...

Here are six new lateral thinking puzzles to test your wits and stump your friends -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.Show notesPlease sup...

Pink paper towels, a lampshade covered in hair-dye sample swatches, and a fake glass of white wine from Japan are just a few of the eclectic things you'll find in Amy Sedaris' rabbit-nibbled one-bedro...

Welcome back to The Bureau. It's the ninth installment and it looks like that sandwich you found in your pocket contains a bossy talking slice of Brain. And man, it's feeding you some gab!...

Bruce Sterling's two-hour talk/Q&A at The Interval, a club for members of the Long Now foundation, may seem like a daunting load for a holiday week, but honestly, it's worth every minute.Sterling...

Reddit user marc_urzz posted this photo of the fantastic sink in his step-uncle's bathroom. A little web searching then led me to the french horn urinals below. It would also be fun to use a trumpet a...

Reddit user marc_urzz posted this photo of the fantastic sink in his step-uncle's bathroom. A little web searching then led me to the tenor horn urinals below. It would also be fun to use a trumpet as...

Today I learned that using cannabis can lower a fella's sperm count: those looking to partake in parenthood should take note. But that's not the only thing that cannabis can do to your swimmers. Acco...

Fizz Buzz is the word-game in which players in a circle count from 1 up, substituting multiples of three with "fizz" and multiples of five with "buzz" ("1, 2, Fizz, 4, Buzz, Fizz, 7, 8, Fizz, Buzz, 11...

When bots finally accounted for half the traffic on the internet, Media Experts speculated that algorithms would start identifying bots as a better advertising target than humans. Max Read points out ...

Retired Cambridge professor Peter Smith has distilled his experience in teaching philosophers and mathematicians about formal logic into a free, frequently updated (last updated: 2017) study guide to ...

Got someone you need bumped off for the holidays? Better start baking.The Real Santa was directed by Robert O'Twomney who was inspired to create the short by a thread he started on reddit's r/WritingP...

The New York Times has published an investigation into infamous American mass shootings and found that a significant proportion of mass shooters go on credit-card fueled spending sprees prior to their...

At considerable expense, Christian Friedrich Johannes Bttner, the man behind successful YouTube channel TheFatRat, recorded and posted an original music video. It ran up 47m views, helping to place hi...

Another child has died in the custody of U.S. immigration officials. Felipe Alonzo-Gomez was taken to a hospital in New Mexico on Monday and released after treatment for a cold and fever. He was given...

Heartbreak, written and performed by poet and playwright Emmet Kirwan, is a spoken word masterpiece. Full of passion, rage and love, heartbreak tells the story of a young Irish woman, raised in an opp...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the plot of Billy Dare, in "Octo-Danger" goes strangely astray....

Magnetic tape maestro Randall Taylor, aka Amulets, takes an old Mannheim Steamroller Christmas cassette in a totally different direction... a totally different dimension. Just when you thought you wer...

I don't know if there's a special term for videos that have had their audio swapped but Marci Robin has got it dialed in. She's taken snippets of popular movies and music videos and set them to new mu...

A video of Baltimore-based rapper and producer HAZMATCAZ impersonating Siri is making the rounds, and for good reason -- it's uncanny!Listen:So last night I met the human form of Siri pic.twitter.com/...

Donald Trump, answering a phone call about Santa Claus from a child, 7, on Christmas Eve: "Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at seven it's marginal, right?"Trump sat in front of a roaring fir...

The New York City Council voted to rename streets after hip-hop artists Christopher Wallace (aka the Notorious BIG) and the Wu-Tang Clan and folk musician/activist Woodie Guthrie. If Mayor Bill de Bla...

A Cincinnati gentleman, running from a police officer who spotted him shoplifting from Walmart, accidentally ran right to the rear entrance of the nearby police station. According to police, "(Jeremy)...

In 1976, German experimental group Can, pioneers of the krautrock sound, released "Silent Night" as a 7" single. Frhliche Weihnachten! Read the rest...

John Eldredge of St. Petersburg, Florida writes in a Facebook Marketplace listing that he made this lifesize Santa in Carbonite for a sci-fi Christmas party. But the party's over and Santa must go. $2...

The Boston Globe is reporting Kevin Spacey has been charged with felony indecent assault and battery of a teenage boy. The alleged incident, which took place in a Nantucket, MA bar in 2016 was brought...

In 2009, Obama signed an executive order requiring the administrative branch to embrace the broadest, most liberal approach to the Freedom of Information Act, reversing John Ashcroft's 2001 memo that ...

An annual tradition (MP3)! Poesy is now 10 -- nearly 11! -- and this year, she's decided to offer us a detailed makeup tutorial, with some bonus horseback riding advice. There's even a musical number!...

A seasonal Russian animation from 1966. Directed by Vladimir Degtyarev, it's 10 minutes long and you won't need subtitles 'cause there ain't no dialogue. [via Metafilter] Read the rest...

An unidentified local news station celebrated the 50th wedding anniversary of couple "Max and Geraldine Bailey" during a "Birthdays & Anniversaries" segment, except that they showed a picture of a...

Political rabble-rouser and anti-Trump activist Claude Taylor wants to make sure that we don't forget the fact that the Saudi government, likely ordered by the crown prince, brutally tortured, murdere...

Artist Sara Sandoval must have practiced a long time to be able to scribble out a portrait like this of Eminem on name tags. It looks like random at first but then she puts them all together and voila...

In 2017, Reality Winner, a 25-year-old Air Force veteran and intelligence contractor was arrested for leaking confirmation of 2016 Russian election meddling to The Intercept; Winner seems to have bee...

For two decades, adolescent smoking has been on the decline, but thanks to vaping products like Juul (which has 75% of the market), teen smoking just jumped by levels not seen for 43 years.Almost all ...

Hundreds of yellow vest protesters marched in Dublin yesterday; like the French gilets jaunes who inspired them, the Irish yellow vests marched for a wide variety of causes, with no unified set of dem...

All the hubbub about Stephen Miller's sprayed-on hair made me wonder if he'd consider having his head painted like the bald gentleman did in this circa 1960 British Path video.(Josh Jefferson) Read th...

Miley Cyrus has changed up the lyrics to the 1953 Christmas classic "Santa Baby" to give them a more feminist spin in this Tonight Show skit with Jimmy Fallon and Mark Ronson. No fur, cars, diamonds o...

Ever lost music, contacts or priceless pictures during an iPhone upgrade? We'd pay for iMazing 2 just to avoid the hassle of going through that ever again. But the trusty app does more than just store...

"Dookie" stars in what was described previously here as "the greatest viral ad in TV history": that being the one for the Squatty Potty, a lavatorial aid that should require no reintroduction. The ado...

Last week, Kansas state senators Dinah Sykes and Barbara Bollier and state representative Stephanie Clayton announced they were no longer going to serve as Republicans and would instead serve as Democ...

Ask any maker: The key to Raspberry Pi's popularity is its versatility. The mini-computer can help kids learn basic coding, but it's also a gateway to everything from retro gaming to a full Internet o...

Some of you may be old enough to remember these most excellent MADtv parodies of Rankin/Bass stop-motion kids' movies, and some of you need a pop culture elder like myself to point you to them. Either...

Remove.bg, a new free web app released by developer Benjamin Groessing on Monday, keeps popping up in my feeds so I thought I'd try it out. With one click, it removes the background of a photo using A...

Cassandra Khaw's shockingly good 3-page short story Monologue by an unnamed mage, recorded at the brink of the end takes a genre and an archetype and distills from them a perfect moment that embodies ...

In Helena, Montana's North Hills, a man was setting up for (legal) target practice on public land when another gentleman shot at him (and missed) several times. The man confronted the shooter who repo...

While I'm sure the new Apple Handsome Anthony will get all the headlines, I'm most excited for the fancy tetra-fusion Hole. And I don't care that it isn't portable yet. Read the rest...

Deborah Smith, walking near the coast at Bude in Cornwall, captured a big chunk of cliff toppling onto the beach below. The coastguard had warned locals it was soon to give way, but only she was lucky...

In October 2017, Syracuse cops arrested Torrence Jackson with a small amount of marijuana and accused him of hiding drugs in his rectum (the officers say they saw him shift in his seat and concluded t...

A couple of times a year, Apple plops out a report detailing all of the user data requests made by government and law enforcement agencies from around the world. In the latest bi-annual report, it loo...

Whether you like it or not, Christmas is a holiday that is nearly impossible to hide from. It's an in-your-face holiday for at least three months out of the year, with Christmas marketing, sales and d...

Bryan Adams has followed up on his earlier advocacy for a new Canadian copyright deal that benefits artists with a submission to the Canadian Heritage Committee's copyright consultation that argues ag...

Kano dropped the price on its Raspberry Pi based Kano Computer. At this price, it's cheaper than buying the components individually (A Raspberry Pi 3, case, speaker and amp, cables, microSD card, wire...

Kamil Rocki was inspired by the 2016 paper from Google Deepmind researchers explaining how they used machine learning to develop a system that could play Breakout on the Atari 2600 with superhuman pro...

Navigating the topic of death with a young child can be a difficult, traumatic experience for parents, especially if the topic is broached by the sudden loss of a loved one. Trying to explain death to...

Musician Isaac Schankler performed Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata by delaying the bass for one bar, and playing the melody one bar earlier than usual.[via Open Culture]Image source: By W.J. Baker (held ...

Cory published a writeup of my research showing Google offshoot Sidewalk Labs plan to build a surveilling city in Toronto involves a much, much larger chunk of land than publicly disclosed (in fact a...

Isao Machii is a Iaido master from Kawanishi, Hygo, Japan. His skills as a master swordsman have landed him a number of Guinness World Records: fastest tennis ball (820 km/h) cut by sword and "fastest...

This guy likes to make ants bite him and wasps sting him so he can post his reactions on YouTube. In his latest video, he makes a Costa Rican Executioner Wasp sting him on his forearm. It's hard to kn...

WARNING: This video is not for the squeamish. Do not watch if blood and cyst guts make you woozy.But for the rest of you who get a kick out of pimple popping videos, this one is the motherlode. The cy...

A gentleman wanted beer, but didn't feel he should have to pay for it, so he climbed over a tall fence to get it. Imagine his outrage when his pants got stuck on the fence, leaving him hanging upside ...

When French President (and ex-investment banker) Macron decided to cut taxes for the super-rich and make up the shortfall by taxing diesel fuel (widespread in poor rural areas) but not private jet fue...

Fox and Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade had it out with Sarah Huckabee Sanders this morning after Sanders defended Trump's decision to pull the US out of Syria. Agreeing with co-host Steve Doocy, Sande...

China does not pay for Trump's tariffs. US companies that import goods from China pay them. To make matters worse, US taxpayers are now having to pay angry US farmers more money than the tariffs are s...

This list of terrible things Facebook did in 2018 (not including the terrible things it did without getting caught) makes it clear that Facebook is a garbage company.March 29BuzzFeed News published an...

I wish I could wear running shoes, but I shouldn't. When I was a teenager, I tore all of the ligaments in my right ankle. Six weeks of physiotherapy and now, close to 20 years later, I'm still walking...

The Green New Deal -- championed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive Dems -- is one of the most popular Democratic policies in living memory, supported by 81% of registered voters (inclu...

Long the province of manly mens' colognes and deodorants, the fashion for smokey, woodsy scents has come to the perfume aisle.Log Cabin Perfumes, as I have taken to calling the growing category of sce...

Police in Opp, Alabama, blame Satan for a recent spate of killings in the rural area. The Associated Press quotes a statement posted to the department's facebook page:THIS PAST SUNDAY, A YOUNG MAN WAS...

Nope, ankle scarves are not the latest thing to come out of Italy or Germany or wherever. I was skeptical when I came across this Country Living article that declared them a "trend," as the image is c...

Whether it's a simple work memo or a dating profile, make no mistake: You are being judged as much on your grammar as on your content. Maybe even more so. If you want to avoid the simple errors that c...

The mad dog's sick of being chained out in the yard. He'll be leaving officially early next year, but the announcement comes a day after Trump personally decided, on an apparent whim, to withdraw U.S....

After watching a CCC presentation that claimed that the MQA audiophile format has "stealth DRM," I decided to investigate, and I'm pretty sure MQA is not DRM.But MQA is proprietary in several importan...

Presently hovering between Halloween and Christmas, after watching Its the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and on the way to A Charlie Brown Christmas. I was seven years old when Charlie Browns sad tree ...

"Every child must be made aware."Directed by Flaming Lips madman mastermind Wayne Coyne and longtime Lips visual art/video collaborator George Salisbury. Read the rest...

Scientists discovered and now described a previously unknown species of snake. Oddly though, they didn't collect this snake in the wild but rather found it inside the belly of another snake. The Unive...

Any director would be hard pressed to top the magic of the original Men in Black movie. Surpassing its two sequels? That's very doable. If this first trailer for Men in Black: International is any ind...

Any director would be hard pressed to top the magic of the original Men in Black movie. Surpassing its two sequels? That's very doable. If this first trailer for Men in Black: International is any ind...

Watch these poor jewelry shop clerks come close to a heart attack as they leap over counters chasing down customers who are running off with jewelry except they aren't. A viral prank in China, jewelr...

We have three cats. We bought this large heavy duty scratching post in December 2015 and all three cats used it countless times throughout the day. By February 2018 it was pretty thrashed so we bought...

On the latest Copy This podcast (MP3) (previously), the amazing Kirby "Everything is a Remix" Ferguson talks to Paul Keller about the new EU Copyright Directive, which will impose mandatory copyright ...

A man in Germany asked Amazon to send him the audio recordings of his Alexa activities, and Amazon complied with the request, giving him a bonus: a link to 1,700 recordings from a stranger. When he to...

Slack banned many ethnically Iranian users today, even those who don't live there and have no current connections with the country or its institutions. The Verge's Russell Brandom reports:In order to ...

Yesterday, we learned that Facebook granted extraordinary user-data access to a handful of blue-chip companies, including Amazon.As a consequence, veteran Gizmodo reporter Kashmir Hill thinks that she...

Brian Kolfage is an Air Force veteran who lost both legs and an arm in Iraq in 2004. He is the most severely wounded Airman to survive any war and has spent the past several years as a motivational sp...

Fracking is grossly unprofitable: the fracking industry is losing hundreds of millions of dollars, but it claims to be profitable and august publications like the Wall Street Journal and Reuters repea...

Airbnb has led to much of the rental housing stock in some of the world's most expensive cities being turned into unlicensed hotel rooms, driving up both rents and house prices even further.Opponents ...

Applied mathematics/computer science student Etienne Jacob makes mesmerizing black-and-white animated GIFs using Processing, "a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code wit...

Josh Dzieza's deeply reported story on the dirty tricks used by Amazon's third-party sellers to beat their rivals is an outstanding read, and an important contribution to the debate about how automate...

Cat furniture maker Jackson Cunningham was banned for life from Airbnb, and the company wouldn't tell him why. In his essay, he compares his experience to the nightmarish Black Mirror episode, White C...

David Miscavige leads the Church of Scientology, the cultlike sci-fi religion notorious for its hostility to members, apostates and critics alike. His wife, Shelly, hasn't been seen in public in many ...

Police are on the hunt for the owners of disruptive drones that have shut down London's Gatwick Airport for nearly 20 hours, preventing flights from taking off and landing. And these aren't your usual...

This is "Woodstock Al #6," a strange and fascinating DIY cassette of covers by an unidentified artist. In 2000, a fellow named Jim Fletcher sent the cassette to legendary WFMU personality and music hi...

The latest explainer video from Kurzgesagt In a Nutshell examines what it would take to actually build a crazy cool idea conceived by Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson - a photovoltaic shell (or, les...

The debates about screen time and kids are really confused: the studies have contradictory findings, and the ones that find negative outcomes in kids who spend a lot of time on their screens struggle ...

A group of academics from economics, business, and policy schools at Kenyon, MSU, Susquehanna and Tufts performed a series of ingenious experiments to determine how much typical Facebook users value t...

By Issie Lapowsky's count, Facebook had 21 major scandals in 2018. This feels low to me. Wasn't it more like 21,000,000? (2018 was a hell of a year).She's arranged her master list in chronological ord...

Russian President Vladimir Putin praised Donald Trumps surprise announcement of U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria, calling it the right decision. Nice to know the boss approves!Putin made the remarks a...

YouTube commenter Steve Kurtics-Lentinello: "They get more depressing over time.. poor Yoda :("Hmmmm.Video by Jason Scanlon. (via Laughing Squid) Read the rest...

Blue Seat Studios' Tea Consent explains the idea of sexual consent through the act of offering someone a cup of tea: it's OK to offer someone a cup of tea, but if they don't want it, then don't try to...

Enjoy this completely perfect keytar made from a Commodore 64. The pickups send sound via an FPGA to the original SID chip to allow a variety of chiptastic effects, applied using the computer's keyboa...

Visitors to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, who thought they were on an NBC Studio Tour, got a big surprise when the elevator stopped on the wrong floor. Both Jimmy Fallon and Michelle Obama were waiting for th...

Did you know... Jeff Goldblum plays jazz with the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra weekly at an L.A. club called Rockwell (road trip!)? And that, at the age of 66, he has released his debut album? Well, both...

On Wednesday night, in a "deliberate act of disruption" (but not "a terror attack") someone flew a drone of "industrial specification" into the airspace of London Gatwick airport, the city's second-bu...

So, get this. For many years now, NASA has been putting out some really fun posters to bring awareness to their space missions. They reference everything from Star Trek to Star Wars and lots in-betwee...

In 1950, four patriotic Scots broke in to Westminster Abbey to steal the Stone of Scone, a symbol of Scottish independence that had lain there for 600 years. In this week's episode of the Futility Clo...

Kevin McCallister (played by Macaulay Culkin, of course) is no longer a boy but has been left home alone again in the same house he was back in the early 1990s. The difference? This time the house is ...

John Sylvan, the Keurig engineer who invented the K-Cup pod coffee system in the 1990s, regrets his mistake. It was intended for the corporate service market and the idea that people have these things...

Hacked EU cables released this week warn that Russia may already have nuclear weapons in Crimea. The private diplomatic messages describe annexed area of Ukraine as a hot zone, and Donald Trump as a b...

This New Year's Day, for the first time in 21 years, new works will enter the public domain in America: the Class of 2019 was all creating in 1923, and has been locked in copyright for 96 years.When D...

Welcome back to The Bureau.The Bureau is a complete soundtrack of a nine hour day at your job, beginning at 8:55am. Each music track is paired with a comic book panel. If new to story, a few highlight...

This weeks tabloids have climbed into their DeLorean, sped up to 88 mph, and raced back to the future to report on scandals that wont actually happen until next week.The British Royal Family doesn't g...

Amazon is offering the LEGO Star Wars Porg for $55, which usually sells for $70.I am not a Porg fan, but my nephew thinks they are the pretty hot. He also loves that yellow Pikachu, whom I find silly....

This Banksy artwork was painted late last night a on a steelworker's garage in Port Talbot, South Wales, UK. From CNN:The art, which appears to pay homage to the town's industrial past, depicts a chil...

Apple's Carpool Karaoke... isn't great. But despite scathing critical reviews of the show, Apple keeps trying to make it happen. In fact, they're so horny for the show to succeed that they've been for...

Ever since I accidentally bought a huge bag of dried nettle leaves on Amazon, I've been having nettle tea at least once a day for the last year. I have a lot of different tea steepers, but my favorite...

This PopSocket has the image of a Viewmaster Reel on the back of it, so as not to scare the older folk.I have written about how my kid and her associates are all Coo-Coo-for-Cocoa-Puffs over their Pop...

It seems that we can't have nice, unhacked things. According to Gizmodo, someone has hacked NASA's personnel database to gain access to social security numbers and other personal information of the sp...

This guy made a video about his train ride using first class Amtrak service between Boston and Washington DC. It took seven hours. By way of comparison, the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto takes two ...

The first time Diana Rowland decorated her lawn with inflatable dragons, a gift from her husband, it was on Halloween. The holiday decor was a success. But this year, when she dressed them up in garla...

This ultra-high resolution panoramic photo was taken from a tower in Shanghai. You can zoom in and see details from far away areas. Incredible! Read the rest...

Take one helmet; mount eye-facing UV LEDs in rim; insert UV-reacting contacts, voila!Caution: shining UV lights into your eyes for extended times will seriously injure you.The helmet is the work of Ki...

The Fortnite Durr Burger onesie is available for pre-order.Epic Games has opened a merch store, they call it Retail Row. Funk Ops is my spirit animal. Read the rest...

Cha is the Japanese word for tea, and kombu is a type of seaweed. Real kombucha is seaweed tea and this video takes you to Japans Rishiri Island, source of high quality kombu.From Great Big Story:Sorr...

Why waste paper, tape and ribbons to wrap gifts when you can just use fabric, or furoshiki cloth? Furoshiki is the art of wrapping something in fabric, and it's also the word used for the cloth itself...

Some communities across California are suing to ban cannabis operations in their vicinity because they claim the smell from the crops is nauseating. I mean, they don't call it skunk for nothing. From ...

It's easy to "jailbreak" an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, so you can run 3rd party apps. This ETA Prime video walks you through it what you need to do so you can sideload Android games as well as Kodi, an ...

Champ, the lake monster that reportedly lives in Lake Champlain, may soon appear on Vermont license plates. Representative Dylan Giambatista (D-Essex Junction) introduced legislation to create the pla...

In 1994, Disney trademarked the use of the phrase "hakuna matata" on clothing, footwear, and headgear. The common Swahili phrase, meaning "no trouble," was the name of a song in Disney's movie The Lio...

When Tumblr announced its plan to purge "female-presenting nipples from its service, the volunteer Archive Team leapt into action, working furiously to preserve years of material before Tumblr tore a ...

A man only identified as Peng, 37, from Zhangzhou, China, was admitted to the hospital with chest pains and coughing bouts. He eventually confessed to being a dirty sock sniffer. He reportedly jonesed...

Designed by Jon Gray and available for pre-order next week (ISBN: 9780441007462): Gibson loves it.Neuromancer is getting a new cover in North America. Its by gray318 and I love it. pic.twitter.com/9xA...

Gmail's text-message two-factor authentication is not only insufficiently secure, but "bypassed at scale", reports Joseph Cox. A new Amnesty International report gives more insight into how some hack...

The intrepid and brilliant artist and journalist Molly Crabapple (previously) traveled to the immigration detention centers of the Rio Grande and interviewed and sketched the people she met there. Cra...

Photographer unknown. (via r/mildlyinteresting) Read the rest...

Facebook is a model of offering incredible, nuanced privacy protections to its users, allowing them to configure exactly how much of their data they want to share and how they want it to be used -- Fa...

Instagrammers are posting things crafted to look like ads and sponsored posts, giving the impression they are paid-up influencers when they are not. A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may ha...

On December 18, 1997, comedian Chris Farley died of a drug overdose. He was just 33. Some 21 years later, his buddy Adam Sandler has written and performed a sweet, though sad, tribute song in the late...

Tommy Lee Jones does ads for Boss Coffee's Rainbow Mountain brand of iced coffee, most of which feature him as a fish-out-of-water Western immigrant observing and enjoying Japanese life, taking odd jo...

A 90lb SentrySafe can be opened with a circular saw; you just saw it in half. While obviously not as bad as a safe that can be opened by stabbing a paperclip into it, the feat is accomplished quickly...

The New York Times reports that Facebook let Netflix and Spotify read the private messages of its users among other things; everything it's said about protecting user privacy has been a slippery lie o...

Someone over at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen's marketing department has a sick sense of humor. For Philly fliers, the fast food chain is offering "Emotional Support Chicken" which are specially-marked, c...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan conducts a rigorously scientific fiscal experiment....

Meet AngelBengal. View this post on Instagram Its the most wonderful time of nesting cats #AngelBengal #weeklyfluffA post shared by Angel Bengal (@angelbengal) on Nov 28, 2018 at 10:01am PST Sorr...

This may be a potty dance, but it's the most adorable potty dance ever.This is a very good dog.Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap (fixed)And here's a more upstream original version, no cropping.Good boy[via]...

I was born without my right hand and play guitar with a duct tape pick I made,says IMGURian abshow. I play drums too!Here is the ABShow YouTube channel.This is a clip of my drum cover of Pentatonix' v...

When your toothbrush is part of the Internet of Shit, sometimes you need to update its firmware, and when that happens, sometimes you have to decide whether your toothbrush will have access to your lo...

Hydrophobia, hallucinations, agitation and partial paralysis: the symptoms that come from being afflicted with rabies are twelve kinds of terrible. Oh, and death: a painful, writhing death. That's in ...

When I was a teen in the 1970s, I lived for foosball. In the tiny town of Chester, VA where I grew up, the Family Circus Foosball Parlor, which had taken over the old turn-of-the-century pharmacy buil...

If you're like most people, you see two different colored skulls above. But they're actually the same color. And no, the color is not purple or orange. It's actually red. How can that be? It's called ...

Entertainment mega-star Penny Marshall has passed away at the age of 75. Marshall produced, directed and starred in some of most fantastic television and movies ever made.Variety:But it all started, r...

A driver has trouble finding the gas cap on her Tesla. (It's best to watch this video on mute, unless you happen to be a fan of Muttley from Wacky Races.) Read the rest...

I like my filter bubble on Twitter. I have no interest engaging with alt-right nationalists, flat-earthers, trolls, and conspiracy theorists. I learned about a Chrome extension called Twitter Block Ch...

Lock him up.Donald Trump's disgraced former national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn went to court today to be sentenced for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Sergei Kislyak, the former Rus...

In this 7-minute animated cartoon, a woman cooks a bao dumpling that suddenly comes to life as a baby. In Bao, an aging Chinese mom suffering from empty nest syndrome gets another chance at motherhood...

The world is full of shitty holiday gifts: socks, piggy banks with no money in them and Star Wars action figures of characters that had MAYBE four minutes of screen time (I'M NOT VENTING, YOU'RE VENTI...

In 2015, a scandal involving the state-owned 1Malaysia Development Berhad fund brought down the country's authoritarian government, amid allegations that the disgraced ex-Prime Minister Najib Razak an...

The fantastic indie game Firewatch, in which you play a fire lookout living alone in a firewatch tower in the middle of a Wyoming wilderness, is now available on the Nintendo Switch for $20.The year i...

Lock him up.Donald Trump's disgraced former national security advisor Mike Flynn went to court today to be sentenced for lying to the FBI about his contacts with former Russia ambassador to the United...

This funny South African ad depicts an African explorer discovering Europe in the 1650s, a counterfactual to the 1652 arrival in South Africa of the Dutch. But it's upsetting people there and fast foo...

Last week, Jackson Racicot, a 17-year-old employee of Walmart for over a year, was fed up with his job and the way Walmart's management treated him. But instead of just walking out, he let them and e...

Shawn Woods has been trying out different home remedies to repel rodents. A while back he grew some hot peppers with a scoville rating of 2 million (one scoville is the minimum detectable amount of ca...

Haisam Elsharkawi is a US citizen of Egyptian descent who was travelling to Mecca in 2017 when he was pulled out the boarding line for his flight from LAX by CBP agents who demanded that he unlock his...

You could be the new proprietor of Katikati Naturist Park, a popular nudist resort in Bay of Plenty, New Zealand! The 5.7 hectares (approx. 14 acres) features motel units, cabins, tent sites, a swimmi...

Some Boing Boing readers may know Edward Gorey without knowing it. The author and illustrator of a 100 (or so) ironic-gothic, darkly droll little picture books with titles like The Beastly Baby, The D...

Not a one of these pooches can deal with a disembodied kitty head appearing on their turf. Maybe it's the size of the cat that it must have come from that spooks them. Maybe it's the way that the pill...

Back when Sony's fraudulent copyright claims resulted in a 47 second recording of pianist James Rhodes playing Bach, apologists argued that Sony and Youtube's copyright bots couldn't be expected to te...

In 1991, Vicky Jo Metz borrowed $16,613 to pay for tuition; now she's 59, and has paid back 90% of that money -- and she still owes $67,277.Metz is broke and has filed for bankruptcy. But thanks to a ...

Charter-Spectrum has settled a lawsuit brought by the New York Attorney General that accused the company of defrauding New Yorkers through false advertising about the data-speeds they could expect fro...

Yesterday, despite the manifest, glaring problems with its porn filter, Tumblr turned on mandatory porn-blocking for all its users' content, so that anything that its bots identified a pornographic wo...

Boing BoingHere's a guide to the charities the Boingers support in our own annual giving. Please add the causes and charities you give to in the forums!Friends of the Merril CollectionI'm on the board...

When lawmakers and cops propose banning working cryptography (as they often do in the USA), or ban it outright (as they just did in Australia), they are long on talk about "responsible encryption" and...

What the hell is this? Well, it's "Babies With Teeth." From PetaPixel:The project is the brainchild of Texas photographer Ashley Evans, and it all started while she was playing around in an app called...

Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced a bill called the Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which allows the US government to manufacture generic versions of drugs "in cases in which no company is ma...

Boing Boing pal Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Team Human, is a fiery, inspiring, and ultimately optimistic call for us to fight against the divisive, commodifying agenda built into our technology, reas...

This year's hot -- and controversial -- holiday toys are Hasbro's Yellies, a line of plush spider-like ("Spooders) creatures that move faster when you scream at them. The toys are creating quite a ker...

Instead of having grownups write a Christmas movie for kids, Stephen Colbert gathered a group of children to write their own Christmas movie concept. That part of the segment was funny enough but then...

Dotsies is a typeface that abandons the latin alphabet completely in favor of dots. Not pixelated letterforms, like a pixel font: seeemingly random agglomerations of noise. It looks like something des...

Improv Everywhere's latest mission? Place a giant red boombox at Pier 17 in Manhattan for passerby to discover and plug in. Real New Yorkers worked together to carry the 160-foot long cord across the ...

We've all seen the videos of thieves shamelessly stealing packages off of people's porches. Now someone is fighting back. That someone is former NASA-JPL engineer/current science YouTube star Mark Rob...

In 1974, the State of New York banned nunchuku, the Okinawan martial arts weapon popularized in the US by the classic Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon. On Friday, 44 years later, Brooklyn federal court...

In 1974, the State of New York banned nunchuku, the Okinawan martial arts weapon popularized in the US by the classic Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon. On Friday, 44 years later, Brooklyn federal court...

Keep fucking that chicken! Read the rest...

In the Ozarks, a Missouri court ordered a poacher to watch the movie "Bambi" over and over again as part of his sentence for a criminal scheme to illegally kill hundreds of deer.From KansasCity.comDav...

Unmute this one!This is a Pantheon style Cathedral in Montefrio, Spain, says IMGURian MayMyEnemiesLiveLong. The design allows for a 6 second long reverb. As an audio engineer, this definitively blow...

In the video below, Actor Jason Momoa, his friends, and his children perform the ceremonial Haka at the premiere of the new Warner Bros. movie 'Aquaman.'PHOTOS: 'Aquaman,' courtesy Warner Bros. Read t...

After Donald Trump was sworn in as President, Russia's information warfare teams focused on a new target: special counsel Robert Mueller.Russia worked to help get Trump into the White House, and they'...

Flynn pleaded guilty to multiple federal charges, and is set to be sentenced on Tuesday.On the eve of former Trump aide Michael Flynn's sentencing on felony charges, special counsel Robert Mueller has...

John Unger writes, "Using marble, stone and precious gems, I am creating a series of 14 mosaics that replicate 16th century anatomical engravings. Each mosaic is 7 x 4 and presents the figures at life...

Arizona realtor Andy Gregg's Nest doorbell/camera started talking to him: the voice on the other end identified itself as a Canadian "white hat" security researcher who'd broken into his camera by usi...

Pablo Ferro died last month at the age of 83. He created many memorable movie title sequences and trailers, including Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Bullitt, Men in Black, The Thomas Crown Affai...

Television's long cancelledCougar Town was horribly named, but an absolutely brilliant sitcom. Bobby Cobb's Penny Can is a testament to its greatness.PENNY CAN!!!!!!!!!Bobby "Wrong balls" Cobb, nickn...

As a rule, the only Christmas music I can stand is Vince Guaraldi's "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Now though, I can punctuate those exceedingly joyful jazz tunes with my friend Greg Dulli of The Afghan...

The Green European Journal has published a package on the proposed new European Copyright Directive: first, an outstanding interview with the rebel Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda (previously); and then a...

In the early 20th century, Arthur Earland and Edward Heron-Allen volunteered at what's now called the Natural History Museum, London (NHM). The two men spent their time researching fossils of single-c...

The employee uprising over Google's secret "Project Dragonfly -- a plan to release a censored, surveilling search engine for use in China -- has reportedly attained its goals: some of the engineers on...

D. Allan Drummond is a a professor of biochemistry, microbiology, and human genetics who has a penchant for trilobites, the marine arthropods that first appeared more than 500 million years ago and we...

Researchers at Nvidia are creating interactive 3D virtual environments using videos of real cities. Read the rest...

Popcorn is the delightful synth instrumental penned by Gershon Kingsley in 1969 for his classic LP "Music to Moog By." It was later covered by countless other artists including this gentleman, Jacques...

A man, woman, and what sounds like a kid are sitting in a car, parked along the side of the road in Windham, Maine, while the man films a high speed chase. Suddenly the speeding car swerves out of con...

Over the weekend, firefighters in Conroe, Texas responded to a house fire caused by Christmas tree lights. When they arrived, they were faced with more than 100 snakes and numerous lizards. From CNN:T...

The host of Honest Guide conducted a sting operation against crooked convenience store employees who double the price of items, like food and water, for tourists. He recommends steering clear of store...

Google's Sidewalk Labs convinced Toronto to let it build an all-surveilling "smart city" on a small patch of lakefront and then promptly shenaniganized things, breaking all its privacy and transparenc...

Kiwibots are autonomous transport robots that quickly deliver food, usually to hungry college students. But over the weekend, students at UC Berkeley found one of these robots rolling along in flames....

A roundup from Lithub of the best cover art on books from this year, with commentary. There's a strong trend toward in-camera or handmade graphics and natural media, with computers only showing up to ...

The Alien Chestburster Christmas Ornament is just the thing to finish your nerdmas tree; it's from Pittsburgh's Creature Replicas, who will also sell you a life-size 'burster, a fossil Tremors graboid...

More outstanding paleocomputing Christmas cheer from Paleotronics (previously): a trove of 55 Christmas covers of classic computer magazines, include lamented bygones like Creative Computing. Read the...

Wired Magazine has just published a package of eight sf writers visions of "The Future of Work," including some of our favorite authors like Laurie Penny (previously), Charlie Jane Anders (previously)...

Despite taking pages of handwritten notes each day, my handwriting is hot garbage. After deciding that I wanted to improve the look of my penmanship, I set out to find a few ways to do it that wouldn'...

The fight against surveillance capitalism and mass state surveillance has reached a tipping point, the peak-indifference moment, when new privacy advocates are self-radicalizing as they witness firsth...

Saeb Erekat is a Palestinian negotiator. The Palestinians and Jared Kushner, Trump son-in-law and ostensibly the man charged with attaining middle-east peace, have apparently not been talking much lat...

Bahnhof is the Swedish free-speech-oriented ISP that was finally forced to block access to Sci-Hub (a site providing principled access to paywalled scientific literature) retaliated against science pu...

Last week, Viktor Orban's authoritarian government rammed through a pair of massively unpopular laws: the "slave labor" law (employers can require up to 400 hours/year of overtime, and take up to thre...

Since protests over changes to Nicaragua's social security system began last April, over 300 people have been killed and, at a minimum, 500 people have been incarcerated for their part in calling out ...

Scottish Limited Partnerships are notorious financial secrecy tools that have been used to launder an estimated $100 billion on behalf of ex-Soviet gangster-oligarchs.An explosive set of court rulings...

To quote Keshana Cauney, in the future everyone will be canceled for 15 minutes.Jared "Threatin" Eames is a mediocre singer-songwriter who booked a European tour by buying a fake following on social m...

People in Soho, Piccadilly Circus, and Leicester Square are being told by the London Metropolitan Police to submit to a trial of the force's notoriously inaccurate, racially biased facial recognition ...

Saturday night was the tenth annual Mid-Century Supper Club's holiday potluck and, as is customary, photos from it have been flooding my feeds since it ended. Once again, there were lots of great crea...

This weekend's viral load was significantly boosted by the appearance of Trump senior advisor Steven Miller on a current affairs show. No-one knows what he said because: What's that on his normally-ba...

This weekend's viral load was significantly boosted by the appearance of Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller on a current affairs show. No-one knows what he said because: What's that on his normally-b...

"Aw yeah it's time for cookies," writes AI ringmaster Janelle Shane (previously at BB).One neural network I use, called textgenrnn, tries its best to imitate any kind of text you give it. Ive given th...

Previously: A bicycle snob takes on an e-bike; The great e-bike experiment: the data)We're moving along now, and are so close to wrapping this whole thing up. Last time, we saw that an e-bike could be...

Peter Sobot, an engineer at Spotify, noticed something unsettling about his Brother label maker. Though apparently high-tech, under the laptop-style case they still use old-timey printing ribbons that...

This clock (supposedly made for kids) cracks me up. To tell what time it is, you have to do some simple math. Here's its story:The Albert Clock is named after Albert Einstein and inspired by an apocry...

Almost immediately after buying my first iPhone in 2009, I became hooked on jailbreaking. Despite the fact that my iPhone 3GS met all of my mobile computing needs, I couldn't resist the temptation to ...

I've used the same fountain pen and Fisher Space Pen for years: I used to constantly lose disposable pens, costing me scads of money every year. The two refillable pens I own now cost enough that I'm ...

I dig Moment's high quality smartphone camera lenses for the convenience that they offer. I don't always have my Sony RX100 III on me. It often isn't even charged and ready to use. But where ever I ro...

Here's my reading (MP3) of my Locus column, "What is the Internet For?" (which asks, "Is the internet a revolutionary technology?") and my short story for the fiftieth anniversary of Reason Magazine, ...

The first time I encountered Matteo Pizzolo, Amancay Nahuelpan and Tyler Boss's comic Calexit, I was skeptical: California separating from the USA is an incredibly stupid idea, predicated on innumerab...

In a deeply researched longread, New York Times investigative reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe document in fine detail the role played by the ubiquitous McKinsey and Company in legitimizi...

In San Francisco, property speculators have made a game out of tearing down historically protected homes, then retroactively applying for demolition permits, and using the now-empty lots to build mass...

For the true audio enthusiast, there's a lot of difference between putting on some songs "for background music" and a true listening experience. For the latter, there's nothing like a pair of sturdy h...

Tim May was one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement, whose seminal Crypto Anarchist Manifesto is still startling relevant today, a quarter century after it was written. May's work was critical ...

Cheap Old Houses is one of my favorite Instagram accounts. The folks behind it scour real estate listings around the U.S. to find and showcase cool old homes being sold at ridiculously inexpensive pri...

When I was in Berlin last month, I stopped into the offices of Netzpolitik (previously), the outstanding German digital rights activist group, where I recorded an interview for their podcast (MP3), ta...

Jimmy Kimmel can be kind of a dick. You may remember that he's had parents lie to their kids, saying that they stole and ate all their Halloween candy -- all caught on camera, of course. That gag's be...

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke (previously) is leaving the cabinet at the end of the month.Zinke was one of Trump's most deplorable swamp-monsters: a man so loathed that even Scott Priutt couldn...

Mick Mulvaney (previously) is a terrible human being -- as Trump's head for the financial watchdog, he's gutted the agency and allowed crooked lenders and dirty banks to get away with ripping off Amer...

What the hell were they thinking? Luxury brand Prada is accused of selling $550 "blackface" figurines. They have charms in their Pradamalia line that are monkeys with dark faces and big red lips, i.e....

"From Morlocks to warlocks, nerds are passionate about a lot of things, but there's one thing they love above all else and that is correcting people*." So begins each intro to the CollegeHumor game sh...

Polish educator Janusz Korczak set out to remake the world just as it was falling apart. In the 1930s his Warsaw orphanage was an enlightened society run by the children themselves, but he struggled t...

Prior to 1976, the FDA did not regulate medical implants, and so shoddy and even deadly devices proliferated, inserted into Americans' body.When the FDA finally decided to regulate implants, they were...

Digital or analog, there's a path of least resistance for any project. Finding that path is what the Agile methodology is all about, which is why proficiency in it is a must for any project management...

Topping the Electronic Frontier Foundation's don't-buy for Christmas list: Facebook's Portal in-home spycams, followed closely by Alexa/Google Home and other "home hubs"; Verizon's "AppFlash" spyware-...

A Lamborghini here, a Lamborghini there, sooner or later it starts to add up.A former pastor at the megachurch founded by prosperity gospel superstar Joel Osteen is having a hard time defending his pu...

This is my new favorite holiday video, forever.The wonderful series of Starrkeishavideos you'll find on Random Structure TV are the creations of YouTuber and incredibly talented performer Cameron J He...

Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi are Jogjakarta, Indonesia-based musicians melding the ancient, traditional sounds of their region with a very contemporary mode of heavy experimentalism. The duo, known...

Firefighters rescued a 29-year-old gentleman who was stuck for two days in the grease vent of a shuttered Chinese restaurant. Fortunately, the owner of a nearby business heard him yelling. According t...

K-Swiss and esports organization Immortals is releasing sneakers designed for playing videogames. Bloomberg reports that the "performance" version of the sneaker, called the Grandmaster, "will include...

No one bothered to tell this honey badger that the garbage can it's digging was designed to be baboon-proof. Not that it would matter: A honey badger isn't a baboon. In just a few minutes, it manages ...

Michael Nielsen was a Fulbright Scholar who got his Ph.D. in Physics at 24. He was already tenured when he decided just three years later to shift his attention to helping democratize Science. Hes pu...

Facebook has notified 6.8 million users that, due to a bug, the company allowed its third-party developers to access all the users' photos, including those marked as private.Facebook says that the bug...

Matthew Plummer Fernandez's Every Mickey is a 3D printable STL file consisting of "Every model of Mickey Mouse found online, compiled as one." Plummer Fernandez instantiated this one at 50.688 x 23.8...

The brilliant Polish artist Jakub "Mr Werewolf" Rozalski (previously) scores another hit with Rudolph's Revenge ("Now you know why they call him 'the red nosed'"). If you like this stuff, you can get ...

This late 1890s Lumire film of Paris is amazing. The image is clear and the motion is smooth. Sound was added, which makes the film come alive (I wish they would have colorized it, too). No cars in si...

Sarah Gailey (who wrote a brilliant, wrenching short story about empathy and self-driving cars) has just published a new story about wearable computers in a series in The Atlantic edited by Ian Bogost...

Russel Walks' astounding and vast collection of unofficial, retro-styled Star Wars propaganda posters are also available in postcard form. Read the rest...

Russell Walks' astounding and vast collection of licensed, retro-styled Star Wars propaganda posters are also available in postcard form. Read the rest...

The journalists whom Facebook recruited to check the spread of policitized disinformation campaigns have called for an end to the program because Facebook has consistently ignored their recommendation...

Amazon filed a patent application for a doorbell camera that scans the faces of passers by and compares them with a database of suspicious persons. If a match is made the camera calls the cops.From AC...

Most everyone's losing sleep over what'll happen to our species and the rest of life on earth as human-driven climate change rips our planet a new one. Capitalists? Not so much: some are too busy hust...

In California, the GOP scores below "no party preference" in voter registration, but much of the state's elites -- business leaders, prosecutors, judges -- have remained Republican, even as the party ...

From a distance, it's hard to understand the nuance of the mass "gilets jaunes" protests that rocked France; with one in five French people identifying as a yellow vest and more vests marching in Basr...

In an article published Wednesday, Fast Company revealed that logoed fruits and vegetables are a hot trend with tech companies, beating out the usual swag like stress balls or notebooks. Serial artrep...

Hungary's far-right, xenophobic government rose to power by exploiting racism and economic anxiety, just like Trump -- and just like Trump, they've pursued an agenda that uses performative racist crue...

Earlier this month, European right-to-repair activists sounded the alarm, warning that the model right-to-repair legislation that had been proceeding through the EU legislative process had been hijack...

In the year 2,000, Susan Potter, then 72, donated her body to medicine. After Potter died, scientists froze her corpse, sliced it into 27,000 slivers thinner than a human hair, photographed each slice...

In this BBC News clip, a child seems to materialize just behind the woman speaking. WTF. Unfortunately this isn't likely a fun glitch in our simulated reality but rather something with much more insid...

Yesterday, the European Union's "trilogue" met for what was supposed to be the last negotiating session on the new Copyright Directive, including the universal filters for all user-generated content a...

One story pegs Elvis Costello as the original impetus for The Pogues' Fairytale of New York. Another points to the band's manager. Either way, it took Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan two years to write t...

This past September, a savage fire cost the world dearly: the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, along with 20 million unique artifacts that provided untold insight into our planet and our c...

Everybody's flown a paper airplane. But what if you could fly on a paper airplane? Until we invent shrink-ray technology, the PowerUp X FPV Video Paper Airplane Kit will have to do - but it's as fun a...

Back in October, Sainsburys grocery chain launched two new questionably-flavored teas based on UK Christmas dinner favorites: Brussels sprouts and pigs in blankets. Metro:Yes, you can now drink meat ...

My home has a fireplace and before the oppressive smoke of wildfires ruined the joy of lighting it, I used to start a fire once in a while during the colder months. Firewood isn't readily available he...

In January 2019, Peter Orosz plans to live broadcast his snowy trek across the Japanese island of Shikoku. He will also produce a printed field report.The story is that last year I walked 2,700 miles ...

San Antonio artist Michael Esparza's oil paintings put Texas-based fast food restaurants in the center of bucolic landscapes. It's hard not to compare his work to Thomas Kinkade's but that's the point...

Dr Nim is a plastic, gravity powered computer from the 1960s that plays the game, Nim, against a human player. Recently Michael Gardi made a 3D scale model of Dr Nim, which you can download and print ...

Six ago I posted singer Dominique Pruitt's first music video, "To Win Your Love." Since then, she's released a number of country-inspired tunes and I like them all. Her latest is "High In The Valley."...

If you're traveling on Alaska Airlines on December 21, make sure to wear your holiday sweater. No doubt it's ugly, and wearing it will get you a free pass to board the plane early, in celebration of N...

NZ$6800 in cash was mysteriously left on cars and toilets at a campground in New Zealand. The recipients of the gifts turned the money over to police, fearing it might be stolen/Image: StuffThanks, Ro...

If you can't stand the thought of sitting through another superhero movie, All Is True looks like a fabulous alternative option. With a stellar cast that includes Dame Judy Dench, Sir Ian McKellen and...

Stephen Keys, an actor who has appeared in many movies, including Soul Plane, was on a flight from Reno to Los Angeles last week. When he raised his armrest so he could get his seatbelt, his pinky got...

After Burning Man founder Larry Harvey died in April of this year, a special storytelling event was held in his honor a few months later at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. I attended "The Man Wit...

A gentleman arriving from Guyana was caught at JFK Airport attempting to smuggle 70 live finches hidden inside hair rollers. He was sent home without his birds, which he was planning to enter in a hig...

The trend is to make distinctive logos all look the same by using bold san serif typefaces. pic.twitter.com/MKMPuBfgv3— JoRoan Lazaro (@JoRoan) December 13, 2018EVERYBODY FALL IN LINE! pic.twitt...

Cash came pouring out of an armored Brink's truck this morning in New Jersey, causing much excitement and chaos including car crashes on the morning drive. Apparently, the back door of the truck was...

This is a fun way to spend about 90 seconds of your day. Read the rest...

For two years now, Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang have been knocking my socks off with their Paper Girls graphic novel, a mysterious, all-girl, Stranger-Things-esque romp through 1980s pop culture, ...

Here are Cool Tools' favorite sub-$10 tools for 2008:CANARY Corrugated Cardboard Cutter Makita Impact Gold Ultra-Magnetic Torsion Insert Bit Holder Pacer Technology (Zap) Flexy-Tips Komelon Speed Mark...

To my delight and awe, I have discovered a whole, new-to-me universe of "realistic flame" effect LED lightbulbs, which produce the illusion that you have a goblet of raging flame sticking out of your ...

No no no no no.This must be, has to be, I really hope it is a joke.But (or butt) its not a joke: a reproduction of your anus in chocolate would seem to be the thing you would send to your worst enemy...

Jerry of JerryRigEverything takes apart the new PlayStation Classic, a miniature replica of the original Playstation that comes preloaded with 20 games.Image: YouTube/JerryRigEverything Read the rest...

This video imagines a social credit system in the UK similar to one under development in China, in which your purchases, interactions with law enforcement and organizations, level of financial respons...

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, isn't afraid to keep it real for kids. Last year they introduced Julia, the first muppet with autism. Now they've launched an initiative called Ses...

Good news everybody! If you're in the Navy or Marines, it's now illegal to throw you in the brig and feed you nothing but bread and water as a punishment.Yes, The American military is still into this ...

People who steal other people's packages off porches are the frigging worst. They've no idea of what's in the box they're swiping: they don't care what they get, so long as they get something. It's bu...

A coalition of shipping industry associations has published The Guidelines on Cyber Security Onboard Ships, laying out best practices for the giant ships that ply the seas, and revealing that these be...

Maria Butina, 30, stood in a D.C. federal court this morning and told the judge that she knowingly engaged in conspiracy against the United States. Then, one hour into the hearing, she stood again and...

These stunning felted-wool witch hats are the handiwork of a Kentucky-based fiber artist named Kate. The world of fantasy felted creations is her full-time job now. On top of creating them, which she ...

Today in the Mojave desert, Virgin Galactic had a successful test flight that reached 50 miles above the surface of the earth, meeting the Federal Aviation administration's definition of space. This p...

When Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality (by illegally ignoring legitimate comments in support of it in favor of millions of anti-Net Neutrality comments sent by identity-stealing bots...

It's been a year and a half since London's Grenfell Tower burned and at least 72 people died.The fire's deadliness was attributed to a combination to a combination of bad advice once the fire broke ou...

Adobe's design software catalog is essential to any graphics program, as much for their simplicity as their versatility. Anyone can be an effective graphic designer with tools like Illustrator and InD...

(Previously: A bicycle snob takes on an e-bike)Last time around, we met the e-bike, and discussed how it came to pass. I was starting to feel comfortable with how it rode, and I was curious to see how...

When eight- and nine-year-old students at Hyde England's Flowery Field Elementary School walked into class last week, they were confronted with a crime scene. Behind the police tape was chalk outline ...

State-owned TV network Russia-24 ran a story about an impressive humanoid robot named Boris that wowed attendees at a youth technology conference. Turns out, Boris the Robot was actually a man inside ...

There's been a lot of money thrown around to determine the future of the Internet in the EU, but despite the frequent assertion that every opponent of the new Copyright Directive is a paid puppet for ...

While researchers continue attempts to build practical insect-size flying robots, engineers at the University of Washington have prototyped a backpack for real bees that outfits the insects with sensi...

Check out this incredibly dedicated animated flipbook re-creation of all the booby traps in the 1990 holiday scare-'em film HOME ALONE, starring Macaulay Culkin and Joe Pesci.It's a supercut flipbook!...

In the first part of the 20th century, classical music was stripped of its majesty and injected with a healthy dose of discord and dissonance by avant-garde pioneers like Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Bou...

Tabloid headlines are from Mars, tabloid stories are from Venus. Thats how far removed are this weeks stories and the headlines that top them.Scott Peterson murdered 2 other women! screams the Nationa...

What a wonderful time to be alive. A photo ID card issued to a young Vladimir Putin has been publicly released by Germany's BTSU, the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service...

Taylor Swift used facial recognition technology at her live performances so that technicians running the system could then check those face scans against a private database of her stalkers. The compan...

Welcome back to The Bureau. This week will be a holiday segment. Above the fold you'll see this week's comic and playlist, and you can catch up here on the current story. While the main office buildin...

The latest episode of the always-outstanding Adam Ruins Everything (previously) is my favorite yet: a wide-ranging look at the way that tech has exploited policy loopholes to monopolize control over r...

In the last three days of the Sri Lankan civil war, as thousands of people surrendered to government authorities, hundreds of people were put on buses driven by Army officers. Many were never seen aga...

In October, a delightful prank by the artist Banksy involved a painting of his shredding itself shortly after a Sotheby's bidder committed to spending 1.04m to buy it. Banksy shot his own video of the...

The company that owns The National Enquirer tabloid will not be prosecuted for its efforts to protect Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.AMI, which owns the tabloid National Enquirer, admit...

Jack Sparrow impersonator Amanda Teague married the ghost of a pirate coincidentally named Jack. Nearly 50% of all marriages end in divorce. Similarly, the Teague/dead pirate union did not last.The ne...

If you live in an area where grocery stores are easily accessible, count yourself lucky: there are large areas in the United States where food choices are limited to what can be found at fast food joi...

If you live in an area where grocery stores are easily accessible, count yourself lucky. There are large areas of the United States where food choices are limited to what can be found at fast food joi...

If you have an avid gamer on your holiday gift list, here are some great game gift recommendations for 2018. You can also find plenty of other candidates in the "What's new in tabletop gaming" pieces ...

Donald Trump's longtime fixer and personal attorney has been sentenced to to 36 months (3 years) in federal prison, plus an additional 3 years of supervised release, in a case in the Southern District...

Today, in a debate scheduled to run between 18h-20h GMT (10AM-12PM Pacific), Theresa May's Conservative Party will vote on whether she will remain leader of the party and thus Prime Minister.If May lo...

Magician David Kwong moonlights (er, daylights?) as a crossword puzzle creator for the New York Times. In the parlance of the craft, he is a "cruciverbalist," one who is adept at making, or solving, c...

Leafcutter Designs of Oakland, California now has adorable mini metal mailboxes ($18 each) made to stuff full of their tiny letters and packages. Wee key included. You may already know that Leafcutter...

Irene O'Shea of Athelstone, Australia just broke the world record for the oldest female skydiver. She's 102 years old. This isn't her first jump though. This badass centenarian started two years ago w...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH we pay tribute to one of the Great Contributors to Science: the ample gut of Donald J. Trump!...

Businesses of any size continue to use PDFs despite - and perhaps because of - their stubborn resistance to simple editing. But for those who need a little flexibility on their documentation, the sear...

Being able to dance and dodge my way out of attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas every January is one of the most important acts of self-care I commit to all year long. While it's alwa...

A feature-length documentary about the making of the 1988 cult classic Beetlejuice is in the works. The film is being made and directed by French Beetlejuice superfan Fred China and produced by Adam F...

No one has been reported harmed. No bomb reported found.Police in Menlo Park, CA are at the Facebook and Instagram campus near the 200 block of Jefferson Avenue. According to multiple local news repor...

Ret. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is asking for no prison time. A memo from the former Trump national security chief's legal defense team was filed tonight, just before his scheduled sentencing.They're aski...

Barcelona-based Eclectic Method is most known for his remix songs that are based on pop culture (previously). Now he's trying something new, an experiment that's a little risky. He writes:Here's a vid...

There are few things finer in 2018 than being able to hunker down with a few friends, in person or online, and beat the living crap out of each other over the course of an hour playing Nintendo's Supe...

A judge in Canada today granted $10 million bail for Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of China electronics giant Huawei. She has to remain in the Vancouver area, where she has a home. The United States has reque...

A U.S. judge today postponed Maria Butina's plea agreement hearing until Thursday. Butina is expected to plead guilty of being a Russian agent who conspired with Russians and Americans to throw the el...

Because it's always a good time to flog a dead horse.Chris Geidner of Buzzfeed writes, The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, seeking an order that would allow it to enforce it...

Stormy Daniels must pay $293,052.33 in attorney's fees, costs and sanctions to President Donald Trump's lawyers, a California judge has ruled in the defamation suit attorney Michael Avenatti brought a...

Gillian Brockell is very brave.We are so sorry for your loss, Gillian.An open letter to @Facebook, @Twitter, @Instagram and @Experian regarding algorithms and my son's birth, on Twitter:Earlier:Some s...

A 33-year-old woman in Ukraine hasn't cut her hair in 28 years, and says she doesn't think she ever will. Alena Kravchenko, from Ukraine, says her hair is part of her identity which, at least in the ...

Why do humans have so little hair, at least compared to all other primates? At Smithsonian, Jason Daley shares the latest genetic research on the biological factors that result in humans' minimal body...

A friend who works in ad-tech tells me that Verizon's datasets from its Yahoo/AOL assets are "the creepiest" in the industry, but even with every dirty trick and every stupid, harebrained scheme, the ...

Several weeks ago, Ted Pilkey of Westford, Vermont installed this massive wooden middle finger sculpture on his lawn atop a 16-foot-pole. From Boston.com:Im not trying to cause hate and animosity to t...

Trafficking guns and explosives to the Irish Republican Army, running a massive criminal enterprise for years in Boston, extorting drug dealers so that they could do business on his turf, acting as an...

Jary, a police dog in South Dakota, puts on quite a performance as he tries out a brand new set of snow boots. Just a little practice and he'll be running with the best of them.Via AP, who found this ...

Comcast offered to get internet service to (96% of) the good people of Charlemont, Mass in exchange for a $462,123 subsidy; instead, the town of 1300 voted to reject the offer and spend $1.4M to build...

It started when Tumblr flagged one of my retrospective posts (a five year old post about the right of British schoolkids to opt out of fingerprinting) as porn.So I made another post, making fun of the...

I've always had a soft spot for Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. They were met with middling enthusiasm from critics, but they served up a whole lot of what I wanted: the abili...

This snake has a mission. It slithers quickly into an open door police station in northern Thailand and makes it way to a visitor who is at the station to report an incident. Without provocation, the ...

SantaCon, a public gathering of soon-to-be-drunk folks in Santa Claus outfits, generally turns destructive. SF city leaders attempted to regulate it this year. Apparently, that did not help much. Some...

Even as an adult, I am entirely confused by cousin relationships beyond "first." This chart is very helpful though it lacks the category of "kissing cousin."(via r/mildlyinteresting) Read the rest...

An investigation by the New York Times into the shadowy world of location-data brokerages found a whole menagerie of companies from IBM, Foursquare and the Weather Channel to obscure players like Grou...

In 1986, Puma gave new meaning to the word sneakernet with the introduction of its RS-Computer running shoe that integrated a digital pedometer in the heel that could interface with your Apple IIe or ...

Never know what to get the person who has "everything"? It's pretty unlikely they'll have anything crafted by death row inmates, and that's where San Quentin State Prison's Handicraft Shop (aka the Ho...

Equifax doxed 145 million Americans, dumping their most sensitive financial data into the world forever, with repercussions that will be felt for decades to come. A Congressional panel convened to eva...

An archaeologist is studying a 4,000-year-old game board carved into the floor of a rock shelter in Azerbaijan. According to American Museum of Natural History researcher Walter Crist, the board was u...

If there was ever collective schadenfreude to be had, it was when we learned that a bunch of young, privileged rich kids got swindled by the promoters of the 2017 Fyre Festival and were left to fend f...

I am a bicycle snob. I'm at a point where beauty and function generally win out over comfort or financial considerations. This is where non-cyclists start to get really confused. Deep down, riding a b...

OMG, these hand-crocheted Yip Yips stockings by Carissa Browning sure do make me smile. The big mouths of Sesame Street's Muppet martians are perfect for stuffing in holiday gifts (and later for stori...

Today, activists delivered more than 4,000,000 Europeans' signatures opposing the inclusion of an automated censorship system in the new Copyright Directive to the European officials in Strasbourg who...

I don't ask for much from a Godzilla movie other than it be ridiculous. Big explosions, Kaiju and doomed citizens running to and fro before being crushed underfoot or by a building are mandatory. In t...

Meeting Queen Elizabeth II was a little too real for 9-year-old Nathan Grant. As she approached him and his parents during her visit to The Thomas Coram Foundation for Children last Wednesday, he bowe...

When it comes to tech, smaller is better, and these items fit the bill both in terms of size and price. We've rounded up our favorite stocking-ready gadgets, most of which are already on sale - and yo...

When it comes to making rope, there's no school like the old school. I love that, despite the advances made in the areas of fabrication and industrial automation, there are still products made using m...

Warner Bros. has just released Emmets Holiday Party, a cute nearly-2-1/2-minute-long short that has The LEGO Movie's Emmett decorating Apocalypseburg for the holidays. It doubles as a promo for The LE...

This spells doom for Trump and the NRA. Paul Erickson, hope the sex was fantastic.Maria Butina, 30, was either a perky gun nut with a fetish for sex-starved GOP losers, or a secret agent in Russia's ...

Rocky Bergen creates gorgeous, downloadable papercraft models of retro PCs, from the Commodore 64 to the Apple ][+ to the Amstrad, with different screens to print celebrating classic 8-bit games, and ...

Apparently, sitting on the floor in Brooklyn is against the law and, if you've got a baby in your arms, watch out! A 23-year-old woman, Jazmine Headley, was at the Human Resources Administration build...

Add this to the ongoing list of "quirky and downright strange" calendars for 2019: Sean Tejaratchi of LiartownUSA's Social Justice Kittens.Its 2019. All around us, ancient evils lurk in the deepening ...

Leon Hong writes, "I made this science-y animation for my wife Elaine Hsiao's research with the hopes that people will learn something new about how all the microbes that live in and on us affect ou...

It's highly unusual for a squirrel to purposely jump on a human. And it's even more unusual for said human to roll with it, without any shock or flinch, laughing while the squirrel does its thing. As ...

Jim Hightower is a longstanding, respected columnist distributed by Creators Syndicate -- but Creators refused to distribute his latest column, "Free the Free Press from Wall Street Plunderers," which...

John Lewis & Partners is a well-known general department store in Great Britain. Its the type of old-fashioned department store that, like the late and lamented B. Altman & Co. (which you can ...

NASA's Voyager 2 space probe has officially left our solar system and entered interstellar space. Now more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from Earth, the spacecraft has crossed the boun...

The latest installment of the Canadaland media criticism podcast (MP3) (previously) features an outstanding and nuanced discussion between host Jesse Brown and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen (prev...

Say a prayer for Our Patron Saint of Taking Down the Current Administration by lighting one of artist Clare Winter's Robert Mueller devotional candles. You can get these rhinestone-embellished candles...

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution does not guarantee Americans "equal" education (which would require similar per-student funding in both rich and poor neighborhoods), merely "ade...

Frustratingly, this video has no data about the identity of the incredible genius featured therein. Who is she? This girl's transformation to... from r/Damnthatsinteresting Read the rest...

In 1948, Costa Rica weathered a civil war, and in 1949, they abolished their military. Since then, Costa Rica has emerged as the Central American success story, more politically stable and richer than...

George HW Bush was a mass murderer and a war criminal and now he is dead.In some ways, Bush I was fated to be a terrible person. His family fortune sprang from his father's willingness to cozy up to H...

Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia psychologist who wrote "The Reading Mind," says that the most common question he receives these days is the following: Is it cheating if I listen to an audi...

"I'm not a narcissist... just trying this mirror thing... testing the camera... seeing how well it works... doooooo... applehead."(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest...

These people are pretty bad at recognizing different languages. And so am I. Bonus facts I happened to find on Ethnologue, a fascinating directory of languages: Apparently there are more than 7,000 li...

So you've got a good eye for pictures? We've got a good eye for deals. And this holiday, there are some solid deals out there for photographers. Check out some of our favorite recent discounts on gear...

In Taylor, Texas an 11-year-old girl helpfully unwrapped her four-year-old brother's Sonic fast food burger and found what she thought was a piece of candy inside. Fortunately, she asked her parents b...

Last week, students at Atlantic Community High School in Delray Beach, Florida were delighted by a new snack offering in the vending machine. Unfortunately, it wasn't immediately clear how to select t...

Smart guy. Has 6-year-old triplets. Knows a shitshow when he smells one. Nick Ayers, who is currently Vice President Mike Pence's Chief of Staff, will NOT become the next Next White House Chief of St...

Writing in New York Magazine, Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith draws on Hubert Horan's outstanding series on the underlying economics of Uber to describe why the company's IPO will be a terrible bet for ...

Spoonflower's gorgeous selection of Haunted Mansion patterns can be printed on demand on wallpaper, giftwrap, or fabric: from the green strips of the maids' uniforms to the purple and black stripes of...

Argentine hacker [Roni Bandini] modded a 1998 Furby so that it responds to stimulus by rattling off a random quote from Jorge Luis Borges. He calls it "Borgy."[Roni] hacked the Furby to replace the sp...

Every year, DJ Riko drops a longform "mixmas" of Christmas mashups; this year's mix is out (MP3 link), featuring everyone from Run DMC to Harry Belafonte to Eels (here's how to get all 16 installments...

It's the 20th anniversary of Anchorhead, Michael Gentry's seminal horror text adventure; to commemorate the occasion, Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna worked with 84 developers to create Cragne Manor, a ...

Binding arbitration agreements were formalized in 1925, allowing two corporate entities of roughly equal size to resolve their disputes outside of a court, saving both parties a lot of money, but sinc...

Take a scroll through any app marketplace and you'll see that the doors are wide open for any game these days - and any game developer. Like any creation, virtual or analog, it all starts with an idea...

Peter Leigh, known as the Nostalgia Nerd on his YouTube channel, has a cool new hardcover book out called The Nostalgia Nerds Retro Tech: Computers, Consoles and Games, which is exactly what it says i...

Sometimes I blog about something and it goes nowhere, much like this girl's domino:Sometimes I blog about something and it continues to weave its way to the many corners of the internet, much like thi...

This unlucky guy tried hang gliding in Switzerland. His instructor failed to attach him to the glider. Watch this video and prepare to wet your pants. Read the rest...

Vegemite has enough salt to be conductive, and is viscous enough to draw distinct traces with on suitable medium (say, toast that has been cooked such that most of the water has evaporated, making it ...

When you've got moves like comedian Joe Kwaczala, it's best not to keep them to yourself. He says, "Yes, this is going to be the official dance from the music video." No, it's not. Watch it anyway.Tha...

The Japanese are extremely proud of their pottery, which is among the finest in the world. And with the special place the Tea Ceremony holds in Japanese culture, tea cups are finely wrought. Many of t...

Having 50% of the universe's population turned into ash by a lunatic seems to have brought everyone in the Marvel Cinematic Universe down. That said, after the emotional thrashing that Marvel fans too...

A moose accidentally rang a doorbell with his behind while bumbling around the outside of an Anchorage, Alaska home.On Thursday, Kyle Stultz and his partner Allie Johnstone heard the doorbell ring at ...

Ground House, a hip burger joint in Irvine, CA, has just gamified eating fried foods with their Fry Roulette. There's a spinning wheel, six types of deep-fried potato products, and 12 different dippin...

When scooter companies like Bird started Read the rest...

Combine a paperclip, tin foil, a cereal box, and a print out to make the Die Hard John McClane Air Duct Christmas Ornament. PS: Die Hard is a Christmas movie. (via Kottke) Read the rest...

Andrew Smith is Trump's chief of the FTC Consumer Protection Bureau, in charge of investigating companies that abuse Americans -- but he can't, because he has previously provided services for over 100...

Emergency rooms at for-profit hospitals are notorious price-gougers, where an ice-pack and a bandage can cost $5,000, and where no one will tell you how much your care is costing until months after th...

At the rate the world is shrinking, you don't need to be a globetrotter for a second language to be a useful skill. And if you're looking to learn that second language (or a third, or fourth), uTalk L...

In 2019, we'll move out of Ultra Violet and into Living Coral, according to the Pantone Color Institute. Their color experts have determined that their Color of the Year will be the "vibrant, yet mell...

Special counsel Robert Mueller says Paul Manafort told discernible lies, including about contacts with his longtime translator and fixer, Konstantin Kilimnik, an employee who is believed to have Russ...

This year, I helped University of Chicago science fiction writer and renaissance scholar Ada Palmer and science historian Adrian Johns host a series of interdisciplinary seminars on "Censorship, Infor...

Hawaiian monk seals are endangered and closely monitored by NOAA scientists who are alarmed that the seals keep getting eels stuck really deep in their nostrils.The scientists have removed "three or f...

Jury finds James Fields found guilty on all 10 charges, including first degree murder of Heather Heyer.Never forget: Trump said they were 'very fine people.'During the 2017 racist rally in Charlottesv...

A member of Generation X finally takes a stand, and it isn't pretty!SF Gate:A samurai sword-wielding man attacked three people early Thursday in San Franciscos Tenderloin, authorities said.The 47-year...

Federal prosecutors in New York request a "substantial" prison sentence for Michael Cohen, who pled guilty to violating campaign finance laws.The Southern District of New York's sentencing memo for t...

Federal prosecutors in New York request a "substantial" prison sentence for Michael Cohen, who pled guilty to violating campaign finance laws. Sentencing guidelines suggest that could mean 46 to 63 m...

Though he was also shot by the suspect in last month's attack at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, Ca., Sgt. Ron Helu was killed by friendly fire during the shootout."We believe that S...

King Size "Pro" Sharpies are my go-to Sharpie.Whenever I need to leave a message for a friend inside of a public restroom or cover up some light colored stitching on a black garment, I reach for a Kin...

The Facebook-fueled anti-government protests in Paris, which began three weeks ago, starting off with a protest against high fuel taxes, look like something out of an intense apocalyptic movie. I'd on...

For the first time, we can hear the "sounds" of wind on Mars as captured by the scientific instruments on NASA's InSight robotic lander. From NASA:"Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat," said B...

I'm heading to San Francisco next week for a launch party on December 11th celebrating the release of The End of Trust, a collaboration between EFF and McSweeney's on internet surveillance and the fut...

Joel Bonasera liked my novel Walkaway so much that he made a 3D-printable bookmark based on Will Stahle's amazing cover art! Read the rest...

Back when Livejournal purged its NSFW fanficcers and other text-based purveyors of delightful smut, users flocked to Dreamwidth, a small, indie, smut-tolerant community run as much as a labor of love ...

Elowan is a "plant-robot hybrid" that uses its own bio-electromechanical signaling to drive itself around toward light sources. From an explanation by researcher Harpreet Sareen and his colleagues at ...

Kano is a Raspberry Pi based computer system. It comes with everything you need besides an HDMI monitor. I love the keyboard with the included trackpad. At this sale price, it's probably cheaper than ...

Yesterday, recreational marijuana became legal in Michigan. To celebrate, Lansing's weekly paper, City Pulse, handed out free joints in front of the capital. Spreading joy with such a simple gesture i...

Watching this 1987 video of two Radio Shacks (one with Madonna music in the background) makes it clear that 30 years can be a long, long time ago. Prancing Skiltaire (the person who uploaded this vide...

High school science teacher Bruce Yeany says, "Here are a few more example of balancing toys that are made with simple materials. Making these types of toys have been especially popular with students...

"Katamari" is the Japanese word for "clod" or "lump," and people familiar with the Katamari Damacy video game franchise know that the object is to created a giant clod of stuff by rolling it around li...

What do you do if you want to complain about your job but your employer is the poster-child for surveillance capitalism? Buy a burner phone.As Facebook's internal tensions "boil over," Buzzfeed report...

In 2017, Pricewaterhousecooper published Using science fiction to explore business innovation, a guide for corporations that wanted to work with sf writers to think about the future of their businesse...

Sam and Simone realized they could build a house for the same amount they would have spent on a year's rent in Australia. So they did, in one of their parents' backyard. It looks great.From Living Big...

I first learned about Liberator sex-furniture from the amazing sex-positive webcomic Oh Joy Sex Toy: the company makes foam wedges, half-spheres, pillows and even loungers that help couples (or more!)...

A British teenager, 19-year-old George Duke-Cohan, has been sent to jail for three years for emailing thousands of bomb hoaxes to schools. He had also called San Francisco Airport pretending to be the...

Qanon is an unbelievably stupid conspiracy theory whose underlying bullshittery is mathematically provable, and whose primary proponents are pallsy with the President, and whose adherents include mass...

Robbo writes, "Gerald Casale, founder of DEVO, has written an open letter in response to the band being inducted into the Rock 'N' Roll Hall Of Fame."Casale was an SDS activist who was present at the ...

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who called Trump a "moron" while he was in office, from which he was later fired, has expressed some more choice thoughts on the president. Speaking to Bob Shi...

Since the InSight robotic lander touched down on Mars last week, engineers have been putting its scientific instruments through their paces. This included extending the lander's 6 foot (2 meter) robot...

Hey, remember those cops who ate a cannabis-infused chocolate bar that was supposed have been taken as evidence during a raid? Do you recall that they snarfed down their stolen snack while on duty and...

As we know, the absurdly long CVS receipts are due to the rise of data mining and target marketing. A fellow from Lakewood, Ohio recently Tweeted his ingenious upcycling of one of those ridiculous rec...

Neti pot brain-amoeba deaths are like shark week: an incredibly rare event that commands outsize attention due to reactionary schadenfreude and the sheer horror of the victim's demise. Fox News:When a...

A patient suffering from heart failure reportedly coughed up a huge blood clot that somehow retained the shape of the lung passages it had blocked. The Atlantic's Haley Weiss reports that "Doctors Are...

A couple of years ago, I was asked if I'd like to review the reMarkable tablet. If you're unfamiliar with it, the reMarkable is an E Ink slate and pen solution that provides a digital note taking and ...

Smokers on the go can breathe a little easier. With an innovative, easy-loading spiral design, the Twisty Glass Blunt offered a smoother, more consistent draw than conventional pipes. Now the Twisty G...

Ok, if you're old enough, you'll remember those cute vintage Chalkware ceramics they used to make to hang in the bathroom. There were a bunch of designs like anthropomorphic seashorses and fish, and m...

Our very own Gareth Branwyn has made Artistic Licenses. He writes: "They sport self-issuing technology. By breaking the wax seal, you are committing to act genuinely, think uniquely, express creativel...

AlphaZero lost only 6 games to Stockfish in a 1000-game series, winning 155 games and drawing the rest. The crushing win sharpens the challenge of neural networks to traditional chess engines.What can...

And played in Kyoto. Read the rest...

Hey, I started something new. When I'm not blogging for Boing Boing or publishing my inbox zine, I'm busy crafting ways to take over the world. I mean, I'm busy trying to think of fun side hustles for...

Hey, I started something new. When I'm not blogging for Boing Boing or publishing my inbox zine, I'm busy crafting ways to take over the world. I mean, I'm busy trying to think of fun side hustles for...

Added some epic wings to accompany my previous Perler Bead Armor set, says Cosplay Amy. Holy cow this is beautiful and extremely committed. It's so gorgeous.Amy continues:Wings are made from 160 indiv...

CNN's Brian Stelter is reporting that a bomb threat has led to the evacuation of CNN's NYC offices. The threat came during Don Lemon's show and the network is currently airing recorded programming. In...

Remember when Malcolm Turnbull, the goddamned idiot who was briefly Prime Minister of Australia, was told that the laws of mathematics mean that there was no way to make a cryptography system that was...

Maybe it's because I'm not doing any of the work myself, or perhaps how serene all of the craftsmen involved in the project seem to be, but this 25-minute video of a traditional Finnish log house bein...

I'm a lifelong fan of Fleetwood Mac's California cocaine trilogy of Fleetwood Mac, Rumours, and Tusk. In the new 150th episode of Hrishikesh Hirway's excellent Song Exploder podcast, Fleetwood Mac gui...

Researchers at Flinders University knocked out a gene known as RCAN1 in mice, hypothesizing that this would increase "non-shivering thermogenesis," which "expends calories as heat rather than storing ...

The British press treat their Royal Family like a soap opera, complete with catfighting sisters-in-law, feuding brothers separating their lives, and an impatient heir to the throne, so its hard to fau...

National Geographics Almanac 2019 is a fun, illustrative guide to the natural world and breakthrough sciences and, with 400 pages of stunning, evocative images, celebrates some of the most amazing pla...

I'm very sad to hear that Pete Shelley, leader of The Buzzcocks, died of a heart attack today. He was 63.From The Guardian:The band formed part of the UKs punk scene and have been closely associated w...

As his title indicates, Harvard astronomy department chairman Avi Loeb is an extremely credentialed astronomer. So when he asserted that an object currently passing through our solar system might just...

The BACU Association -- the folks behind the incredible brutalist Socialist Modernism Tumblr -- have announced a limited run, 800-copy book collecting photos and details on 242 Socialist Modernist "ob...

Liartown, USA is Sean Tejaratchi's (previously) incredible, longrunning visual surreal satire site, and it is the latest casualty of parent company Verizon's decision to purge the site of all NSFW con...

Nicole says: "Today's all-new episode of Vox Media's 'Consider It,' kicks off with Stephen Miller's uncle, David Glosser, who says that if his dead grandfather were to hear about his nephew's immigrat...

Boing Boing pal Laura Hudson is helming a new project at The Verge called "Better Worlds," an anthology of ten science fiction stories written by diverse authors; half of them have been adapted as ani...

Don't let this kitten's cute and fluffy appearance fool you. Every time the wildlife official from the Center for Biological Diversity tries to cut the cage open to set the young bobcat free, he lunge...

Jamie Dimon is CEO of Jpmorgan Chase, the massive bank that settled a $13 billion mortgage fraud case with the DoJ in 2013 by committing more mortgage frauds to raise the cash; he has since taken the ...

According to Wells Fargo, a "computer glitch" caused the improper denial of 870 loan modification requests, which led to 545 foreclosures in which Wells Fargo customers lost their homes; the bank is n...

Since 1959, patients undergoing eye exams have stared at eye-charts whose limited set of characters was created by Louise Sloan; now, the typographer Fbio Duarte Martins has completed the font and rel...

And I didn't even know Keith Richards was missing.The New York Times reports on the discovery of a mudlarker's body in the Thames mud, complete with thigh-high leather boots.Britons fishing or scaveng...

Every year, NYU's nonprofit, critical activist group AI Now releases a report on the state of AI, with ten recommendations for making machine learning systems equitable, transparent and fail-safe (201...

I bought a second Contigo Autoseal Chill Stainless Steel Water Bottle (24 ounces) because it's on sale today (plus there's a 5% off coupon) and I really like the one we have. Note that this will arriv...

First, take this quiz to see how good you are at distinguishing between real faces and fake ones made with generative adversarial networks (GANs). Then, read this article that teaches you how to spot ...

Mack (9) and John (13) have lived in Korea for about 4 years. They speak Korean fluently and with good accents, and now appear on television frequently. (In the video, a restaurant server who spoke wi...

Stephen Colbert points out some of the comical Trump moments at Bush's funeral, from destroying the casual chatty mood between the Obamas and Clintons to the zoning out when everyone else is reading t...

My daughter was actually convinced to take a bath, upon learning her new Kindle Paperwhite is waterproof.I think we have a photo of every member of our extended family, from grandparents to cousins, l...

Composer and producer Josiah Steinbrick -- who has worked with the likes of Devendra Banhart and Danger Mouse along with releasing his own music -- is also a rigorous record collector and curator of a...

This morning David and I were texting each other about the Brady Bunch, which we often do because we love the show and so does every member of our families. We got to talking about the episode where t...

Trump can't make up his mind about his approval ratings, going from puffed up braggart last night to paranoid finger-pointer this morning.Last night he posted a boastful tweet that his approval rating...

David Lynch has directed many television commercials but this one from 1993 for Adidas, titled "The Wall," gives any surreal perfume commercials (including Lynch's own) a run for their money. (Get it?...

In an open letter to the EU and European national officials who are negotiating the final form of the new Copyright Directive (by all accounts, a hot mess), some of the largest rightsholder groups and...

The Satanic Temple of Chicago has installed a stately and elegant statue at the Illinois Capitol between the Christmas tree and Hanukkah menorah. Predictably, some people are pissed. Approximately 4.5...

Anthony Bourdain left us earlier this year, but the joy he found in the world's many cultures and traditions will always be around for us to savor.In this quick holiday story, written by Bourdain, Nor...

Happy Holidays on the Island! Looks like a mad army of insane snowpeople are on the loose!...and the ominous "Ho! Ho! Ho!" Read the rest...

Is there life out there? That's one of the mind-boggling questions that the SETI Institute explores through its scientific research, all the while inspiring our own curiosity and sense of wonder about...

A teacher in Visalia, California, "forcibly cut a student's hair off" while singing the national anthem of the United States of America. College of the Sequoias police responded Wednesday to a Univers...

We've talked before about how hard it is for folks driving for Lyft and Uber to break even. Things aren't so hot for cab drivers, either: as ridesharing becomes more prevalent by the day, those who ow...

National Geographic compiled its list of the twenty coolest places on planet Earth in 2019. The top three: the small Japanese town of Setouchi, the continent of Antarctica, and the city of Pittsburgh,...

"And not everyone is happy."the controversial trend is back in the spotlightand not in a good way. Penis facials are receiving a lot of backlash following a November 21st Instagram post by actress Kat...

For just 2 you could own this remote-controlled boat sculpture that was once featured at Banksy's Dismaland. That is, if you guess its weight correctly. Banksy has donated the coin-op artwork to go in...

Kodi is a pretty clingy cat. So, his human companion Sho Ko set up a camera to record the little critter while he was out. Turns out Kodi spends most of his day anxiously pacing by the front door maki...

Ugly Christmas sweaters are out. In 2018, ugly Christmas dresses and, yes, sneakers are in. The latter are serious road running shoes: Brooks' Ugly Sweater Levitate 2 ($150). Well, as serious as jingl...

That massive data breach that hit hotel group Marriott? Now there are clues the hackers behind it were working for a Chinese government intelligence gathering operation.Let's refresh on how bad the ha...

Tchiya Amet says Neil DeGrasse Tyson raped her in the 1980s. As his star rose, no one believed her. Three additional women, one for the first time, now say Neil sexually harassed them. This isn't look...

An outbreak of Legionnaires' disease that killed one person and sickened 22 near Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, California last year may have been caused by an unexpected source. A health official test...

Genius.How to save your hair in the winter. Original art by IMGURian shenanigansen.(via, Photograph: Shutterstock) Read the rest...

Facebook's changes to content display algorithms met with the fierce devotion in France to local and regional identity, and the so-called yellow jacket protests in France exploded.Whats happening righ...

The downfall of Milo is delicious. The flaming Trumpster fire lasted just one day on the crowdfunding platform Patreon before getting banned. No-platforming works. The Mercers want their money back fr...

Brace yourself. President Trump and others in the image above are facing an imminent criminal prosecution showdown, but tomorrow Donald is due to give 'Hanukkah remarks' again. Have some popcorn handy...

Timothy from Creative Commons writes, "In the US beginning Jan 1, 2019after a devastating 20 year drought brought on by the infamous 1998 'Mickey Mouse Protection Act.' Creators, commons advocates, l...

For the past couple of years, the United States has been investigating allegations that Huawei shipped American-made products to Iran. The why of the matter is that having Iran get their mitts on US g...

In 1998 I profiled artist/inventor Chuck Hoberman for Wired (read it here). It was a fun article to write because Chuck is brilliant, and very nice. You have probably seen two of his most famous expa...

Russia is back on its Ukraine bullshit again: last week, the Russian navy boarded and seized a Ukrainian gunboat and a tugboat taking the crews of the vessels prisoner, at least for the time being. NA...

Laurie Penny (previously) got sent on the 2018 CoinsBank Blockchain Cruise -- a four-day cruise filled with "starry-eyed techno-utopians and sketchy-ass crypto-grifters" who solved the fact that there...

From the weekly series The Bureau. Brought to you this week by the U.S. House of Representatives and InjectoCortex, Proud provider of INF-based Brain Transistors for Elected Officials (IBTEOs) since p...

Most HD television sets have a motion smoothing setting to reduce blur, but if it is applied to movies, it makes the movies look like a soap opera. Its very annoying. Heres Tom Cruise, pleading with p...

Scotch Tear-by-Hand Tape costs a bit more than regular packing tape, but the convenience of not having to tear the tape (and your fingers) with a dispenser is more than worth the additional expense. ...

Gourski & Appel reduce an idea to phenomena, and a genre to its fundamentals: Against our fast-moving world, in which media content is often reduced, Jonas and I let inspiration guide us to creat...

Our washing machine chatters and shakes so much that sometimes I think it's going to break apart. (In fact, I hear it shaking right now.) I adjust the feet frequently (why do they make it so hard to ...

Peter writes, "ThingsCon, our Berlin-based non-profit for a more responsible IoT, launches a trustmark for IoT - the Trustable Technology Mark. Cory gave some input to it a while back already, and fin...

Cavalier King Charles Spaniels die of heart disease. I wanted to help Zuul lose some weight.Having one big dog and one little dog has made doggie weight management more of a challenge than ever before...

Pro Office Calculator is obviously just a normal (Mac/Win/Lin) calculator, right? Wrong. I love this shit. (via Waxy) Read the rest...

This year, the people of Wisconsin pronounced their verdict on the GOP legislators who seized control over the state through gerrymandering and voter suppression: overwhelmingly, they voted to replace...

Lucas Brar plays Gershwin's "Summertime" on a guitar, starting with a simple bass line, them adding increasing complexity as he continues.Image: YouTube Read the rest...

USA Today reports that a police station christmas tree garlanded with stereotypically black items and posted to social media resulted in demotions and suspensions.Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arra...

Damian Collins chairs the UK Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee; it was he who ordered the Parliamentary Serjeant at Arms to drag a visiting US tech executive named Ted Kr...

The sushi-making scene is one of many standout scenes in Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. Now we can see how the sushi-making scene was made, thanks to this time lapse video of animators moving the sushi ...

Cops see themselves as a thin blue line, but the job is is turning into a scarlet letter.Nationwide, interest in becoming a police officer is down significantly. In Nashville, job applications dropped...

An Amazon warehouse in New Jersey sent 24 employees to the hospital after they were exposed to bear repellent fumes. Others were treated at the warehouse. The employees had trouble breathing and said ...

Fortnite Battle Royale's Season 7 will feature Fortnite Creative, where players get Mark Zuckerberg's dream... their own private Island.Epic Games' Fortnite Battle Royale is a 100 player online virtua...

Hokkaido is the northernmost of Japan's major islands. It's here that the practice of racing giant draft horses is being kept alive. The horses race against each other by dragging heavy sleds (weighin...

From 1955 to 2015, John D. Dingell served in the US House of Representatives, making him the longest-serving Congressman in the country's history: now, in the Atlantic, he warns that at the 2016 elect...

They're burying George HW Bush today and even before they planted him, the whitewashing began: we've heard an awful lot about how kind he was to his service dog and his love of colorful socks and a lo...

When Trevor Noah brought The Daily Show to his South African home to celebrate what would have been Nelson Mandela's 100th birthday, he stopped by his childhood neighborhood to visit with his 91-year-...

Coming up in part 3: "I'm looking for a gift for my aunt."Of course, no Mitchell & Webb sketch may be posted without including the increasingly relevant classic: Read the rest...

Rudy Giuliani is having some Twitter trouble. It started last week with covfefe-esque tweet. Nope. No idea.Then he tweeted this, which resulted in one of Twitter's greatest moments of 2018.Putting a p...

Rudy Giuliani fatfingered a tweet last week and inadvertently referenced a nonexistent URL (G-20.in); some clever wag registered the URL and stood up a static landing page that reads "Donald J. Trump ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the the home of the Smythes, of Chagrin Falls, USA, is selected as an additional Amazon HQ....

Long before Quora admitted to being breached and losing 100,000,000 million users' account data, it had disqualified itself from being used, by dint of its impulse to hoard knowledge and the likelihoo...

In the Occult Defence Agency Budgeting Simulator, you are placed in charge of the budget for an organisation whose mission is "defending the United Kingdom from paranormal threats. Vampire covens, str...

Poor people were not the primary target of Obamacare; as a group, their care is more likely to be "non-compensated" (trips to the emergency room while classed as "indigent" and unable to pay), so insu...

In 2011, Europeans rose up over ACTA, the misleadingly named "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement," which created broad surveillance and censorship regimes for the internet. They were successful in la...

Sometimes, smaller is better - especially when it comes to technology. Doubly so when it comes to gear that will fit into that Christmas stocking. From high-powered flashlights to high-performance ear...

The European Union is at risk of missing a historic opportunity to bring the right to repair into legislation for the first time.From Monday 10 December all EU member states will be called to vote on ...

The European Union is at risk of missing a historic opportunity to bring the right to repair into legislation for the first time.From Monday 10 December all EU member states will be called to vote on ...

The Michael Flynn Memo is out. It's redacted af.According to the sentencing memorandum filed by the Special Counsel tonight, Donald Trump's former national security adviser sat for 19 interviews with ...

There are dozens of free "peoplefinder" sites that buy up commercial databases and combine them with other sources to make your home address searchable. You can find instances where this has happened ...

Romanian Artist Costin Ionita transformed a Lenin statue in Bucharest into this enormous writhing rose-headed hydra. The photo is sadly uncredited by the source, which has many more. Read the rest...

Over the weekend it seemed like a solid trade agreement putting the trade war on hold for 90 days had been made between the United States and China. And then Trump couldn't resist Twitter, where, ov...

As you may have gathered from the headline, there's a new Captain Marvel trailer to be had. This time around, we're treated to a little more background on one of the most powerful characters in the Ma...

Coal can be dangerous to mine, is a finite resource, and has, over humanity's centuries of using it as a power source in one way or another, done unspeakable damage to our environment. The Sun's light...

The most quotable movie of my lifetime, The Big Lebowski, has a fantastic 20th-anniversary commemorative set. The 20th-anniversary gift set includes a shawl collar sweater for your disc, a Big Lebowsk...

"Ryan ToysReview" is such a simple concept for a YouTube channel. A 7-year-old boy Ryan plays with his toys, commenting to the camera as he rolls trucks, squirts glue, pretends to fly airplanes, and...

Aol deliberately provided advertisers with the means to illegally track children and target advertising to them. It will pay a $5m fine, reports The New York Times. At Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin report...

If the Crown Prince went in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes, Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said after a closed-door Senate briefing with CIA Director Gina Haspel. In other words, C...

Watch below. A triumphant Manhattan moment. I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me. I'm going to see it again and again and again and again and again. The most intense fight Ive ever seen pic.twit...

"Its aggressively tangy, like Kool-Aid made from pine cones." That's how The Atlantic's Olga Khazan describes the smell of the men's body wash she used during a recent shower (it was her boyfriend's b...

Samsung's latest phones have a "portrait" mode that cleverly fakes the look of a shot taken with a fancy lens on a full-frame sensor. But a picture they used as an example in an ad turns out to be a s...

It's irrational that successful confectionary mogul Willy Wonka would pass on his wealth and his business to a naive, well-meaning boy. Violet Beauregarde, last seen suffering from bloat, was the obvi...

Sweden's Disgusting Food Museum is opening a touring exhibition in Los Angeles's Architecture and Design Museum. The exhibit runs from December 9 to February 17. "What we find disgusting has to be lea...

Tim of Grand Illusions demonstrates a neat little trick, called the Magic Sword, in which a piece of solid metal seems to pass through another piece of metal.Image: Grand Illusions/YouTube Read the re...

Why Evolution Is True introduced me to a profoundly awesome example of mimicry in nature: Uropyia meticulodina, a moth from eastern Asia that looks like a dead leaf.Real Monstrosities: "Its not just b...

Imad Khachan is proprietor of Chess Forum, the last chess shop in New York City. When no other place will welcome you, you have a seat [here], Khachan says.Khachan is the subject of King of the Night,...

Long before #MeToo became the catalyst for a women's movement about sexual assault and a decade before the fall of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and U.S. Olympic gymnastic doctor Larry Nassar the...

When a rightsholder complains to Google about a website infringing its copyright, Google will generally delist the site, but allow the site's owner to contest the removal through a process defined in ...

In 1992, seven years before the premier of SpongeBob SquarePants, the late Stephen Hillenburg was enrolled in CalArts' Experimental Animation Program. As a student, he created his first cartoons, incl...

LA's John of Beans makes shells with teeth! Choose from the Smooth Shell With Lowers and the Snail with Molars (both $90) or a Mussel and Barnacle with Molars ($35) (via Creepbay) Read the rest...

Dark Reader is a browser plugin, available for Firefox, Safari and Chrome, that gives any website a light-on-dark color scheme. Unlike some other efforts, it can invert images too. You can tweak on a ...

Facebook's walled garden/roach motel strategy made it progressively harder and harder for charities to reach supporters on the web, driving them within Facebook's confines, where they devoted thousand...

Archaeologists at an excavation site for London's Thames Tideway Tunnel (the "super sewer") dug up a 500-year-old skeleton who died with his boots on. Based on the location of the find, the boots, and...

8 years after Scott Walker and his Koch-backed GOP used voter suppression and gerrymandering to steal control over Wisconsin, Wisconsites finally pried his crooked ass out of the governor's chair, but...

From the beginning, Facebook's strategy was to build a walled-garden-cum-roach-motel content and users checked in, but they never checked out, so over time, everyone and everything was captured within...

Here's a turntable that no one asked for: the Oreo Music Box ($20 but includes cookies). To get it to work, just place a cookie on it, put the arm on the cookie, and then press the black "play" button...

In this chilling video, YouTuber oncologist Chubbyemu tells the story of a woman who colon-cleansed by drinking a liter of soy saucewhich would be about 200g of sodium on top of whatever other crap is...

Would you know how to spot a fake painting?In this Wired video, forensic scientist Thiago Piwowarczyk and art historian Jeffrey Taylor of New York Art Forensics go through their five-step art authenti...

Two years ago Sunday, a fire broke out at the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland, California. By the time it was extinguished, 36 people -- friends of friends from the Bay Area art and music community I ...

Your racist uncle is about to have a new favorite TV channel. Conservative media superstars Glenn Beck and Mark Levin are merging their respective networks to form Blaze Media, a venture they claim wi...

In the late 1800s Chicago families bought their Christmas trees from the decks of schooners that had ferried them across Lake Michigan. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll meet...

I feel like such a chump. Several years ago, I hadn't planned on buying anything at a Tupperware party that I had agreed to take place in my home (yes, they still exist). But then the hostess told us ...

More than almost any career, graphic design is about the marriage of creativity and functionality. Assuming you've got the tools of the trade, all you need is a tutor that can show you how to join the...

The Boing Boing Gift Guide has dozens of great ideas for stocking stuffers, brain-hammers, mind-expanders, terrible toys and badass books. It comes in four easily-digestible parts, this time around: B...

The question-and-answer sharing website Quora says about 100 million users were affected by a hack blamed on a malicious third party.We have discovered that some user data was compromised by unauthori...

Yes.A collection of the sponsored ad trash shirts and items we see daily on Facebook (and Instagram).' View this post on Instagram #tbtA post shared by Facebook Shirts (@facebookshirts) on Nov 20,...

Tumblr will ban 'female-presenting nipples' and other content beginning December 17, 2018. Photographer and writer Nate 'Igor' Smith is a longtime Tumblr user whose work straddles the boundaries of ar...

He Jiankui, the scientist who claimed to have produced the worlds first gene-edited babies using CRISPR technology, is missing. Reports indicate he has been detained by Chinese authorities.The scient...

President Lenn Moreno of Ecuador *really* wants Julian Assange out of that London embassy. Convicted felon and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort suggested he could broker a deal for the han...

BB pal Lissa Soep of YR Media (formerly Youth Radio) writes:Our Interactive team delved into Spotify's algorithm to discover how songs on the platform are scored for their "danceability." We were intr...

When MP3s conquered music, it depended on three key technologies: CD ripping software, file-sharing software, and MP3 playing software, primarily Winamp.Winamp was infinitely customizable, and there w...

Ricky Jay magician, sleight-of-hand artist extraordinaire, actor, author, scholar of weirdness and oddities, Guinness award winner for throwing playing cards passed away on November 24th at age 72.R...

Peter Brown was born in Philly, but he made the mistake of visiting Jamaica for one day, years ago on a cruise. But that gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Sheriff of Monroe County,...

Australia's Paleotronic is celebrating Christmas with twelve posts celebrating the best seasonal computer ads of the years between 1980 and 1992; today is day 1: 1980, in all its Coleco gloriousness. ...

The medical world is no stranger to shilling (see, for example, the kickbacks that Purdue Pharma paid doctors who helped hook people on Oxycontin, generating billions in blood-money for the "philanthr...

Later this week, China plans to launch its Chang'e-4 spacecraft to the far side of the lunar surface. The aim is to land a rover on the dark side of the moon for the first time. Blocked from direct co...

When Rudy Giuliani went to Twitter over the weekend to whine about the Mueller investigation, he somehow, accidentally, created a website link in his post. Mueller filed an indictment just as the Pres...

Everest isn't the most difficult mountain in the world to climb, but it is one of the most expensive. The individual cost of getting one's athletic ass to the top of the mountain range is between $40,...

When Tod Kurt of ThingM recommended these reversible Micro USB cables, I bought a 3-pack on Amazon. They really do work. Both the USB male plug and the micro plug can be inserted without regard to the...

Since 1991, Canadian sculptor Gillian Genser has used shells to make her artwork. The mussel shells she grinded released dust filled with heavy metals, which got into her body and poisoned her. Now sh...

Remember the days before beautiful CGI was everywhere? Newtek's Video Toaster was revolutionary, now largely forgotten. Read the rest...

The supergeniuses at The GI (go ahead and carve out about ten minutes to marvel at their homepage, I'll wait -- you'll thank me) have posted Shrek Retold, a fan remake of Shrek in which 200 different ...

Oil and water don't normally mix, unless you emulsify it with something, like soap, egg yolk, or mustard. But there is a way to mix oil and water without using an emulsifier, and in this video, the Ac...

After traveling two billion miles over more than two years, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has arrived at asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft will survey the asteroid, collect a sample, and bring it back hom...

High ranking German government officials were outed this year for secretly supplying advice and assistance to the xenophobic, violent, far-right extremist Alternative For Germany (AfD) party.Now, inf...

Making your own decisions can be hard work. Often, I turn to my trusty Magic 8 Ball. How have things turned out? "Ask again later."My Magic 8 Ball has the same pat 20 answers as every other Magic 8 Ba...

A guy set up a camera to figure out how his small dog was escaping its enclosure in the kitchen, and this is what he found. Who knew French Bulldogs were so nimble? Read the rest...

Raspberry Pi is a line of inexpensive ($5 - $35) single board Linux computers. The latest model is the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, which costs $25 and is quite a bit smaller than the 3 Model B+. This epi...

Tumblr, the mainstream web's last redoubt for niche smut, is going to clean house. The social blogging platform is banning all adult material on December 17.Banned content includes photos, videos, and...

"For God's sake, fund it as a mainline program. Don't put it in yet another competition with science," Russell "Rusty" Schweickart insisted. "This is a public safety program."While some elements of th...

Ryan Jewell is a professional watchmaker in New York. In this episode of Wired's Deconstructed series, Jewell (good last name for a watchmaker) takes apart two Carpenter watches, one with a Swiss move...

Steve of Miller Knives found an extremely rusty old Estwing hammer at a flea market and restored it beautifully. The process is the product. Read the rest...

On stage at the G-20 summit on Saturday, Trump suddenly wanders off, for no apparent reason, leaving the president of Argentina standing alone. A staffer runs after him, trying to corral him back. We ...

Forbes's Steven Salzberg rejects the claims of those who say that the House of Representatives will be made more responsive by increasing the number of reps to 593 (or so), this being the cube-root of...

Part of what makes Fortnite's Battle Royale mode the most popular video game ever is the never-ending stream of meta changing physics, tools, weapons and map changes. Streamer Ali A finds a way to gli...

My new book is called Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful, and it's a fictional look at human genetic modification in the near and distant future. The book is told through six interconnected stories,...

In the mid-1990s, a 7th grader named Tom Clark gifted his buddy a cassette containing his cover of Nirvana's then-new album Nevermind. All of it. A cappella. In 2008, the recipient released the casset...

The Clarion Workshop, hosted at the University of California San Diego at La Jolla, is an annual, six-week, intensive writing workshop for aspiring science fiction and fantasy writers (I'm a graduate ...

If you want an example of how big of a problem Chinese espionage is, you needn't look any further than the warnings that Canada and the United States have been throwing at corporations and governmenta...

Countries surrounding the North Sea imposed an outsize impact on world affairs. But the sea itself was once land, and might have stayed that way had world temperatures been a degree or two different. ...

There's a lot of controversy surrounding the use of police body cameras. Some privacy advocates argue that the video captured by the always-on cameras has little effect on the behavior of police offic...

The Republican election of Scott Walker and his band of Ayn Rand cosplayers was a triumph of massive corporate spending, voter suppression and gerrymandering that meant that the votes of the majority ...

Right-wing persona Milo Yiannopoulous was supposed to tour Australia with an ever-shifting lineup of alt-right numpties. But it's all fallen apart, and the tour organizers have taken revenge by dumpin...

Cephalopod intelligence is widely known, but scientists struggle to understand why it evolved. The New York Times' Carl Zimmer reports on one of zoology's most fascinating questions.About 275 million ...

Thirty years after its mostly-European heydey, the Commodore Amiga remains a cult favorite with a huge library of excellent and often weird games to discover. But what if emulation isn't your idea of ...

Remember zooming your model X-Wing through the living room as a child, making an imaginary run on the Death Star trench? Looks like technology has finally caught up with your dreams. Not only does the...

I haven't played Bloody Rally, an old-school top-down racing game echoing Super Sprint and Carmageddon, but I like the look of its procedurally-generated tracks. Read the rest...

After pulling over a woman he claims to have seen drinking beer at the wheel, Sanford, Fla., police officer Michael Wagner filed a citation saying she'd been breathalyzed over the legal alcohol limit,...

Australia just passed into law one of the world's most censoring copyright law, which allows the country's media giants like Village Roadshow to use one-sided administrative process to get court order...

Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner (previously) has put out a call for "the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!" (no styrofoam or support materials allowed) with prizes...

Creepbay is a beautifully selected catalog of online "creepy and cool" merch, skewed heavily to Etsy, though not limited to it: it's full of stuff that will probably end up in my house, eventually (th...

The Girlfriend Zone is the place that women find themselves repeatedly and insufferably placed into by their male platonic friends, who can't or won't understand that the relationship is and will rema...

Every time Trump reminds you that the stock market has experienced a feverish, tubercular bloom under his presidency, just recall that 84% of stocks are held by 10% of Americans.The wealth of middle c...

Each year, Baby Center polls parents to find out what they named their newborn. In 2018, more than 742,000 parents answered. Based on that data, here are the top baby names for 2018.Girls:1. Sophia2. ...

Over 200 hardcore Shrek fans contributed to the crowdsourced Shrek-Retold, a full-length, deeply-artistic scene-by-scene remake of Dreamworks' original 2001 animated film. The 90-minute adaptation is ...

Ok, I'm not just sharing these "Cutetitos" for the sake of sharing them. I'm sharing them because I've just learned that toy makers have figured out that young kids really like unboxing videos and the...

Talking Heads frontman and all-round musical/art-theory/bicycle genius David Byrne has published a playlist of "Eclectic Music For the Holidays," recommended by the musicians in his orbit: a fine way ...

Aella was a top-earning, top-ranked camgirl who performed sex shows over the internet for money, using the popular Myfreecams platform; she quit a year ago, and has written an incredibly detailed, sou...

Jack Poulson is the former Google Senior Research Scientist who quit the company's machine learning division over Project Dragonfly, the company's secret plan to build a censoring Chinese search engin...

On November 28, Conservative MPs removed references to assault rifles from the Offensive Weapons Bill in order to win support for Theresa May's Brexit bill from the European Research Group -- the hard...

RIP George H. W. Bush, 19242018. Read the rest...

After St Louis police officer Jason Stockley, killed an unarmed black man named Anthony Lamar Smith with an unauthorized AK-47, planted a pistol on his body, and was then acquitted on murder charges i...

Trump's about to make a bunch of whales, turtles, and dolphins go deaf.The Trump administration is about to take a preliminary step toward oil and natural gas drilling off the Atlantic shore, by appro...

Art Donovan (previously) writes, "Delivered. A very special design commission for the Project Director of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. A 'white glove' delivery, in fact. The first lamp in 28 ye...

Amber Guyger, the Dallas cop who killed an unarmed neighbor in his own apartment then claimed she had thought she was in her apartment, was charged today with murder.Guyger, who was arrested and fired...

At the age of 15, Tavi Gevinson was the prodigy founder of Rookie, a latter-day second-coming of Sassy Magazine -- a smart, funny, critical teen magazine that presaged the odd world we live in now, wh...

A 7.0 earthquake hit eight miles north of Anchorage, AK this morning, followed by a 5.8 earthquake. The earthquakes caused buildings to crack and roads to buckle, along with "major infrastructure dama...

It's becoming more difficult by the day to recognize the nations we live in as the same ones we grew up in. Men and women, terrified of their lot in life becoming smaller than it is, fueled by the hat...

There are few things more satisfying in life than watching someone who attempted to do something awful being handed their ass by their would-be victim. It's a good thing the scumbag was wearing a helm...

There's been quite a bit of bad ink surrounding Tesla electric vehicles this year: delays in production, growing rumors about subpar customer service, former employees blowing the whistle on dangerous...

Watch. So chilling.Find someone who is as happy to see you as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince bin Salman, who high-five each other and dive in for a bro hug, laughing like only...

After Trent Reznor dissed Ted Cruz at his Nine Inch Nails concert a few days ago, telling his audience that the "pain-in-the-ass" senator "was bugging to get on the guest list, and I told him to fuck ...

On Sunday, Pastor Bartholomew Orr of Southaven, Mississippi's Brown Baptist Church flew down from the rafters to deliver a sermon about the unexpected second coming of Jesus Christ. Gotta spend money ...

On Making Light, Avram Grumer is compiling a list of real songs about fictional songs, like "The Time Warp," "Jailhouse Rock," "The Monster Mash," "Crocodile Rock," "Waltzing Matilda," "The Tennessee ...

As part of their research on the future of play, RMIT University's Exertion Games Lab demonstrated a game based around an ingestible sensor pill that measures internal body temperature and transmits t...

Procedural generation isn't just for video game landscapes and galaxies. The technique for creating vast amounts of realistic but uncannily superficial content goes back a long way. Pfizer used it to ...

New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood has concluded that seven New York hospitals illegally billed rape survivors for their rape kits, at least 200 times, for sums ranging from $46 to $3,0...

Astronauts on board the International Space Station have switched on CIMON (Crew Interactive Mobile CompanioN), a new AI companion robot built by German space agency DLR, Airbus, and IBM. CIMON is an ...

Blue light special in his pants.Newsweek:The local police department tweeted on Tuesday officers were working what appeared to be a self-inflicted accidental shooting inside the Watson and Yuma Walmar...

More than 200 runners in last weekend's big Shenzhen Half Marathon were caught cheating by traffic cameras as they snuck through trees, cutting out up to three kilometers from the course. (I did simil...

Even though now I know how it's done, that food still looks so damned delicious. (via Kottke) Read the rest...

Five years ago, I coined the term "peak indifference" to describe a moment when a public health problem -- like climate change, tobacco use, surveillance capitalism, or monopolism -- reaches a tipping...

How bad is the Marriott/Starwood breach disclosed today? "Unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014 For approximately 327M of these guests, the info includes some combination of name, ma...

It's on? After important legal news in the Trump-Russia investigation broke on Thursday, Donald Trump canceled a planned one-on-one meetup with Vladimir Putin at the G20 summit on Saturday in Buenos A...

You may remember that, in Japan, you can rent fake family members to fight loneliness (or for other reasons, like you want your kid to have a "dad"). Well, Conan O'Brien has been filming in Japan and,...

DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather both pitched deals to their followers, but did not disclose or admit they were paid to do so. Both are being fined as a result of the undisclosed sponsorships, which wer...

Monopoly for Millennials, an edition of the game noted for its surprisingly contemptuous mockery of younger generations, was perfectly-designed to go viral. It's $55 at Amazon, but WalMart had it for ...

Some drafts of Article 13 of the pending EU Copyright Directive no longer contain the word "filters" -- because the world's leading technical, legal and human rights experts all say these will lead to...

Want to skip Amazon and support independent artists this holiday season? Head to the online market put together by the good folks of the XOXO festival. They've curated some really cool stuff made by e...

Stayed at a Starwood hotel in the last five years or so? Every one of you and more—as many as 500 million people, says owner Marriott—are implicated in what would be the second-largest hac...

These porcelain druggist jars by Jonathan Adler are certainly conversation starters but do you really want to label your drug stash so obviously? Expand your horizons with our Druggist Canisters. Drea...

The best part of this marvelous guide is the "draw the rest of the owl" moment halfway in where you must perform an act of origami with a single hand that must simultaneously hold a corner down—...

They say to create solutions for the problems you have and that's just what graphic designer Christian Boer did. He has dyslexia and, for his graduation project a few years back, he created a font tha...

Back in 2007, Adam "Apelad" Koford created a marvellous, funny, weird alternate history for the then-viral phenomenon of LOLcats, running-gag memes of cats whose superimposed dialog had many odd gramm...

If you're not familiar with Don Moyer's Calamityware, you should be. His series of blue-and-white porcelain pieces look like ordinary dinnerware at first glance but look closer and you'll spot the fan...

Sleepnumber is an adjustable "smart" mattress whose sensor-package include a microphone and weight sensors; the microphone collects data including your heartrate, respiration and snoring; the other se...

Sheryl Sandberg asked Facebook staff to research George Soros because he gave a speech boldly critical of the social media giant as a menace, reports the New York Times tonight.After Davos, "in an ema...

Robert Muellers investigation into Donald Trumps plans to build a Trump Tower Moscow has led the Special Counsel to question the role Ivanka and Don Jr played in trying to secure a Russian real estate...

The 2016 plans for Trump Tower Moscow 2016 included giving Russian President Vladimir Putin a $50 million penthouse.Donald Trumps failed 2016 scheme to open a Trump Tower in Moscow is at the center of...