For the last ten years, Mattel has released an annual Barbie Career of the Year doll (with the exception of 2017). Recently, the 2021 career was announced to be a music producer. Barbie dolls and their careers have come a long way since she was purely a fashion model in the 1950s and '60s, and Barbie as a professional long precedes the Career of the Year line. While there have been numerous astronaut Barbies, more recent iterations are tech and business related, with a spate of political Barbies, too, in the last few years. Ada Palmer takes us through the history of the professional Barbie as a marketing tool that reflects our evolving culture.

So, what does the Career of the Year sequence show us about Barbie as a mark of centrist feminism? A few things. One is that women-in-tech is definitely a thing, far more in the minds of the organizers than women-in-STEM, since we haven’t seen biologist Barbie or epidemiologist Barbie showcased, only several iterations of tech Barbies, including software and hardware. It also shows through things like entrepreneur Barbie and architect Barbie that sometimes they look a lot at research, especially about income and what are high-paying careers, and think it’s important that Barbie encourage girls to go into high-paid professions not just exciting ones (beloved-yet-underpaid careers like teacher and nurse have been frequent Barbie careers but not showcase ones).  They also sometimes run into challenges in communication, i.e. ‘entrepeneur’ is a very important concept but very difficult to communicate in a doll via clothing and accessories, as is true of many careers.

Palmer gives us a review of each Barbie in the series, as well as a look back at previous professions, at Ex Urb. -via Metafilter

Charter Group Birdcams in Israel gives us a glimpse into barn owl nests as they raise their young. Sometimes there is real drama. See, barn owl parents leave the nest during the day and return at night. In the above video, from June 8, a pigeon enters a nest with seven owlets of various sizes. The pigeon decides to stay, regardless of the other residents. She even lays an egg! But then the parents come home, bringing rodents for the kids, and do not take well to the home intruder.

In a second video, taken June 29, a couple of pigeons invade another owl's nest with four nestlings, but these are larger owlets who defend their home even before mama gets back.



In the third video of this trilogy, recorded on July 5, the pigeons tried setting up shop in an owl's nest in which the owlets have fledged, but they still consider this box their home. They will defend it.



Despite the violence, the pigeons appear to be ultimately successful in this last attempt to take over an owl's nest, as the owlets are old enough to leave the nest for good. Persistence pays off, but at some cost. -via Nag on the Lake

Update: A pigeon egg successfully hatched today.

Tom Breihan is in the middle a long series of music reviews for Stereogum. To be specific, he is reviewing every song that was #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart since 1958. You can see them all here. This week, he is up to December of 1989, in which "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel was #1 for two weeks. Breihan doesn't hold back.

I hate “We Didn’t Start The Fire” so much. I hate it with my whole being, my entire soul. I hear that nattering keyboard riff and those hyperactive bongos and “Harry Truman Doris Day,” and I become a different being. My blood becomes lava. My teeth become knives. In seconds, I could reduce a rhinoceros to ashen bone with the sheer acidity of my stomach bile. As a song, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” is a cursed and godforsaken work of torment, a towering abomination. Its sheer musical unpleasantness is, in its own way, almost impressive. If Billy Joel had actually set out to create eardrum-stabbing experimental hell-music, he couldn’t have done any better.

Okay, now tell us what you really think. I always considered “We Didn’t Start The Fire” to be a so-so song with a catchy chorus and nonsensical lyrics. To be honest, I had no great expectations for a Billy Joel song by 1989. But Breihan explains his hatred for the song, and then adds a few videos of cultural references and parodies spun from “We Didn’t Start The Fire” at Stereogum.  -via Metafilter

Photography can be documentary- recording the world as it is, or it can be an art medium. These approaches are not mutually exclusive, as many great photographers combine the two. Arthur Tress is known for both his artful documentary photos and his photographic art. But between 2010 and 2013, he had fun with a new hobby, or a game, as he calls is, combining art and photography in a different way. Tress took children's coloring books from flea markets and thrift shops and combined them with found photos he's collected over the years to make collages that are simple and sweet, but can be read to have deeper meaning.

“It would be an evening’s recreation to match up coloring-book pages with photographs,” Tress says of the photocollages he made during those years. “It became sort of a game, almost like Old Maid.”

The game was played as follows: “I’d put a coloring-book page on a table and then pull a photograph from one of my little white envelopes,” he says of the everyday containers he uses to organize his collection of hundreds of found photographs into categories such as children playing games, animals, buildings with geometric shapes, and World War I. “A lot of the pairings ended up being by chance, depending on what I happened to pull,” he says, “but I did have the choice of doing the collages in a surrealistic way, where there would be dissonance between the found photos and the coloring-book subjects, or in a way where the photos and subjects would be similar. I decided to make the pairings congruous.”

Read an interview with Tress and a deep dive into some of these unique photocollages at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: Arthur Tress Archive LLC)

In 1916, the New York City borough of Queens consolidated all its mounted police into one precinct in Richmond Hill. That meant they needed a much larger stable, for up to 70 horses. One was located and rented from a dairy company. But a large stable with horses, hay, and horse feed soon became infested with rats and mice. The police needed a cat to keep the vermin under control.

Tramp, described as a big-headed, earnest-faced, blue-eyed cat, limped into the station house on Church Street in 1919. (By this time, the precinct was known as the 118th Precinct.) The poor cat was limping because his front paw had been badly crushed in an auto accident. Somehow, he knew he could help at the building with the green lights out front.

Detective Sergeant Albert Hill bandaged the cat’s limb and placed him on a little cot in the reserve room. Tramp reportedly purred, meowed, wagged his fuzzy tail, and threw grateful glances toward his cat-man hero.

While Tramp was bed-ridden, the officers couldn’t do enough to help him. They brought him food and pet him every day. Then they officially admitted him to their ranks–even going as far as giving him a collar that stated, “P.D. 118 Prct.”

On recovery, Tramp became a dedicated and hard-working officer. He also became somewhat of a star among local journalists, who lauded his talents and made up fanciful stories of his ambitions. Read about Tramp, the police cat of Queens at The Hatching Cat.  -via Strange Company

Enjoy the Eurythmics hit played by various gadgets and appliances, such as a toaster, printer, electric toothbrushes, and calculators. The steam iron adds both a good hiss and visual effects, but it's the googly eyes that really make the video special. Another cool video from the Device Orchestra. -via reddit

Wasps, which include yellowjackets and hornets, are annoying any time you disturb them or threaten their nests. But in the late summer, they are more likely to approach your picnic or backyard barbecue for no discernible reason and ruin a good time. Just a few weeks before, they left you alone. To understand why, you have to know something about a wasp's life cycle and habits.   

To that hard-working mid-summer wasp, your prosecco luncheons and BBQ beers were a bore, because what she was after was protein. She is a hunter, a worker. In mid-summer, her purpose is to provide her baby siblings with protein. She is a sterile cog in a big superorganismal machine, driven by evolution to pass on her genes by raising siblings. Usually, the protein she hunts is other insects (garden caterpillars or flies). She brings prey to the colony where there are thousands of baby siblings to feed.

She might chew the prey up a little (and perhaps ingest some too) before feeding it directly to a larva, but the bulk of the protein goes to the babies. In return for her hard work, the larva will give her a carbohydrate-rich sugary secretion. This is thought to be the main mode of nutrition for adult worker wasps. Each colony will produce several thousand worker wasps and they are kept very busy for much of the summer feeding these brood; with the drive of a drug addict, they are hooked on the sugary secretions from the lips of their baby siblings.

Then as time passes, those larva turn into pupa, and no longer need to be fed as they turn into adult wasps. As the number of larvae dwindle, the adults look elsewhere for their sugar fix- like your flower garden or the beer that you may be holding. Read more about the cycle of life in a wasp's nest over the summer months at The Conversation.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Jerzy Strzelecki)

After the fall of the last imperial dynasty in China, the country fell into a decades-long struggle for a cohesive government. While there were many factions involved, those most likely to succeed were the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communists. Chiang had help in his rise to power from a man named Du Yuesheng, who you've probably never heard of. For decades, any books about Du were banned in China, and even the mention of his name was forbidden.    

Respectable heads of state rarely admit to keeping company with gangsters. But in April 1927, about 15 years after the collapse of the last imperial dynasty, Chiang Kai-shek and China were at a crossroads. Chiang had followed a murky path to leadership of the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang. Although the Kuomintang was rivaled by an assortment of warlords who ruled the provinces as their personal fiefdoms, in Chiang’s mind the greatest obstacle between him and control of that vast and war-torn country was a young Communist Party which, he believed, would soon be nothing but lethal trouble.

So generalissimo Chiang turned to Du Yuesheng of the infamous Green Gang of Shanghai, a criminal brotherhood rooted in equal parts menace and murk. Du was the leader of this criminal enterprise, and the bloated, gleaming international city lived and died by his word. It was the power of death which most interested Chiang that spring. He wanted nothing less than complete power over all of China, and to get it, he was willing to trade the lives of thousands and allow the establishment of a vast narcotics empire. Others might have balked at trading the murder of a few thousand political opponents for this goal, but neither Du nor Chiang felt any such hesitation.

The French and American residents of Shanghai factored into the struggle, as the foreigners preferred order instituted by organized crime to the rise of the masses of oppressed workers, for their own survival. Read the story of drug lord Du Yuesheng and his role in the Shanghai massacre in the latest longform article, or listen to it in a podcast, at Damn Interesting.

In junior high and high school, my class studied one Shakespeare play every year. The only one I recall much about was Macbeth, reserved for seniors, because it was so difficult. "Macbeth doth murder sleep," indeed! Macbeth has long been considered the scariest of Shakespeare's plays, as it contains ghosts, witches, murders, curses, blood, and even walking trees. Productions of Macbeth have been littered with so many accidents and fatalities that it is considered a cursed play, and thespians won't even say its name.

But fans of Macbeth often say its freaky qualities are deeper than just the plot devices and characters. For centuries, people been unsettled by the very language of the play.

Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It’s as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the “continuous sense of menace” and “horror” that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes.

Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore did an analysis of the language used in Macbeth, down to individual words. Which words were used more than in other Shakespeare plays? How were those words used? They came up with the creepiest word in Macbeth, but it's not one you would have guessed. Then they had to explain why its use made the play so unsettling, which you can read at OneZero. -via Metafilter   

(Photo credit: Ungry Young Man)

"The Elephant's Song" tells the story of Old Bet, the first circus elephant in the United States, related from the perspective of a farm dog. Written by Lynn Tomlinson and Sam Saper, the bouncy blues tune belies the sad story, accompanied by lush award-winning animation by Lynn Tomlinson.

-Thanks Sam!

It is with great sadness that we learned of the death of Charlie Watts on Tuesday. The stylish Rolling Stones drummer was 80 years old, and had planned on playing the arena circuit with the band this fall, up until just a few weeks before his death. With tributes rolling in from all corners, people are sharing a particular anecdote they've heard over the years about Watts punching Mick Jagger in the face in Amsterdam in 1984. Hardly anyone gets all the details right from memory, so Vulture reprinted the story from the book Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters.  

This is the most famous Charlie Watts story. It is a very good story, and true — you cannot beat the Charlie Watts right hook. It’s like being hit by a freight train. Think about him playing “Rip This Joint” on the side of your skull, and you begin to get the idea.

These were bad times for the Rolling Stones. Keith had finally gotten clean, and while Mick had been doing a championship job holding things together with a world-class junkie as his second, by the time they come out the other side, he is convinced the Rolling Stones are his band, and the last thing in the world he wants is to cede control to a cleaned-up junkie guitar player now capable of sharing the decision making. What’s more, heels are dug deep into the argument that will define the confusion of their work for years: Mick wants to make a trendy pop record heavy on dance music, and Keith wants to stick to their roots and drive the guitars into the earth. Blues, reggae, rock’n’roll, whatever, just no tricks. He doesn’t care what the kids are listening to — he cares about what the Rolling Stones do best. The situation only gets worse when Mick decides he needs a solo career.

But that's just the setup. You can read the whole thing as it happened at Vulture. 

pic.twitter.com/YUR6lckf8k

— Keith Richards (@officialKeef) August 24, 2021

Chicago in the 19th century had a problem. The city treated the Chicago River as a waste-disposal system, carrying sewage, garbage, and dead animals away to Lake Michigan. The problem was that the city also drew its fresh water from the lake. Engineer Ellis Sylvester Chesbrough tackled the problem by moving the city's intake valve further out in the lake. Separating the intake from the mouth of the river was a temporary fix, because how far away is far enough?

It was once again Chesbrough who came to the city’s rescue. Chesbrough proposed an audacious plan—reverse the flow of the river away from Lake Michigan. Chesbrough’s outrageous plan worked like this: just west of Chicago River lies a barely perceptible ridge called the Chicago Portage, that separates the drainage basin of the Great Lakes from that of the Mississippi River. Rainfall on the west of this divide flows naturally towards the Des Plaines River, which moves southward to converges with the Kankakee River to form the Illinois River, a tributary of the Mississippi. Any rainfall on the east of the divide flows into the Great Lakes. Chesbrough thought that if a canal could be dug through this divide and made it deeper than the water level of the Chicago river and the lake, gravity would cause the Chicago River’s stinky water to flow backward away from Lake Michigan.

The plan was massive and took years to complete. And it worked! Chicago no longer had to worry about sewage in their drinking water, because it was going into the Mississippi River instead. Which was now a problem for every settlement along the Mississippi, including St. Louis. Read the story of Chicago's scheme to deal with wastewater at Amusing Planet.

Taking on-site pictures and video of sports events is a pretty prestigious assignment among photographers, but it can be dangerous! This supercut shows that occasionally a cameraman will stick his lens in the wrong place, but most of it involves being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Access has its hazards. -via Digg

Monowi, Nebraska, is the smallest incorporated town in the United States, with a population of one person. You read about it here quite a few years ago. Elsie Eiler has been the mayor and sole resident since 2004, when her husband Rudy died. So when Eiler read the results of the 2020 census, the information on her town came as quite a surprise.

The U.S. Census Bureau was reporting Monowi’s population had exploded by 100% and was now home to two people, according to 2020 results it recently released.

“Well, then someone’s been hiding from me, and there’s nowhere to live but my house,” Elise Eiler said Wednesday. “But if you find out who he is, let me know?”

His name is Noise, and he was created by an algorithm to try to protect Eiler’s personal information. Monowi didn’t add another resident to its population, but the Census Bureau did.

“What you’re seeing there is the noise we add to the data so you can’t figure out who is living there,” a Census spokeswoman said. “It protects the privacy of the respondent and the confidentiality of the data they provide.”

It's a bit late to protect Eiler's privacy, as she is well-known for running her small town as she sees fit. She's not alone, so to speak, as the nearby town of Gross went from a population of two to three, unbeknownst to the couple who live there by themselves. Read about the Census Bureau's algorithm that alters the reports we see, called disclosure avoidance, at the Lincoln Journal-Star. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Andrew Filer)

The ninth, or possibly tenth, movie in the Fast & Furious franchise is called simply F9, or sometimes F9: The Fast Saga, or maybe Fast & Furious 9. At any rate, that's so many movies that the main cast has wandered far from the world they inhabited in the first film, yet they continue to use the same action movie tropes to reel in an audience. Screen Junkies is well aware of this, and so they had plenty of material for this Honest Trailer.