Free public domain audiobooks. Read by volunteers from around the world.

Eleanor recognizes that only in The Bad Place would people be forced to treat others as disposable…so they must be in The Bad Place. And when she makes decisions on the assumption that she isn’t in an ideal world, this throws a wrench in Michael’s plan. He has to reboot that world because Eleanor’s behavior has become incompatible with it. Eventually (in “Team Cockroach” S2E4) Michael joins them, realizing that he needs their help if he himself is to escape the ultimately punitive and carceral regime of which he is a part. That’s what the show spends the rest of season 2 doing: season 2 is about mostly white women and people of color (and one white male accomplice who literally is a mostly(?) reformed demon…plus Janet, who I’ll get to later) collectively practicing philosophy on the assumption that the world they live in is not in fact equal but designed to harm and oppress them. [...] Beginning from the assumption that everyone’s on more or less an equal playing field and thus entitled to equal weight in the conversation (and that people generally want to do the right thing, which Mills calls the assumption of “strict compliance”), this is the same “both sides” liberalism that Mills critiques as ideal theory. Despite what Schur tells us the show’s message is, season 2 shows us a very different message, one about the importance of beginning from the assumption that you—especially if you are a white woman, person of color, or non-human person—are in The Bad Place. And you’re there not because of anything you did, but because White Men engineered it that way for their benefit.

It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds.

The size of the company, which is held in trust, is dictated by the terms of Laughlin’s will. There are, and will be, just nine employees, and the number of books the company may publish each year is also fixed. Profits are generally reinvested, and the relatively low salaries paid to staff are balanced out by policies like an annual bonus system—which alone might make up ten or fifteen percent of a year’s earnings—and a retirement savings plan. These constraints were baked into New Directions’ business model in the interest of quality and longevity. “We’re expected to make our own way financially,” Epler told me. “The trust is just how he left it to make it safe, so we couldn’t be bought by a larger corporation.” As intended, those constraints have factored deeply into the company’s acquisition strategy. Its employees leverage connections, taste, a worldly sensibility, a capacity for risk, and thrift in order to bring revenues to the company and fine new books to a global readership.

On men’s reaction to the Kavanaugh hearing. Yesterday, many women wept and tweeted about weeping, but the men seemed to be taking it even harder, to be shaken by it, broken even. And they seemed to be broken because, perhaps, for the first time ever, they had to face the reality of what existence is like for all the women in their lives. They had to understand that every bit of progressive advice they’ve given women at bars, over dinner tables, in annual reviews, or under covers didn’t fucking matter. It meant that those firm conversations filled with directives—we all know what they sound like—to just “ask for that raise,” or just “go to HR and tell on your boss,” or “OK, if I’m being honest, what’s wrong with you is that you apologize too much” actually carry no weight. Because yesterday, the liberal men saw that a woman can take their advice, march into a room, and tell her truth, and she can walk out of the room

But let’s be honest: We as Americans have set certain landscaping expectations for our office parks, our median strips, and our suburban yards, and it involves blowing. Ours is a nation too vast to be groomed by hand tools. So we must learn to co-exist with these man-machine hybrids, the Blower Guys, as they roam the grasslands, blasting organic debris before them with their mighty nozzles. (A little-discussed complication to the arguments of anti-blower partisans: Like ripping an awesome burnout or firing a machine gun at a roadside gun range in Las Vegas, wielding a pro-grade leaf blower can be a wasteful-but-satisfying projection of power. It’s akin to being some kind of ancient wind deity.)

Importantly, having “no recollection” of the night in question, or no “knowledge” of the alleged events is not the same as saying it didn’t happen — especially since Ford never alleged that anyone but Kavanaugh and Judge witnessed the assault. So why would a judge, someone presumably familiar with the implications of what it often means when a witness avers they “do not recall,” so grossly mischaracterize the nature of those statements?

Like its ancestor cool, chill does double duty as a prestige marker. On the one hand, in the post-#MeToo era, chill masculinity seems infinitely preferable to so-called “toxic masculinity”, which is predatory and self-destructive. But even though Sheeran’s tame romanticism may feel less toxic than the slightly skeevy masculinity of bro-step, chill is less a step towards equality and more an update on gender and race stereotypes.

It doesn’t matter who you are, horniness makes fools of us all. In the right context, the revelation of that vulnerability can be almost sacred in its intimacy. But in a society that unconditionally gratifies powerful men and derides sexual women, it’s easy for that desire to get turned inside out, to become weaponized against its object.

Guided meditations are offered freely by Tara Brach, Ph.D, psychologist, author and teacher of meditation, emotional healing and spiritual awakening.

For an introduction to mindfulness meditation that you can practice on your own, stream or download the guided meditations below. Recorded by UCLA MARC's Director of Mindfulness Education, Diana Winston.

Though Donald Trump has made it into a catchphrase, he didn’t come up with the metaphor “drain the swamp.”

The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?

The “true-crime boom” of the mid- to late 2010s is a strange pop-culture phenomenon, given that it is not so much a new type of programming as an acknowledgement of a centuries-long obsession: People love true stories about murder and other brands of brutality and grift, and they have gorged on them particularly since the beginning of modern journalism.

Supply chains at Apple, VW and others still include the owner of a mine where workers produce cobalt without safety equipment

Hurricane Florence will make landfall in the Carolinas on the same day the US Department of Energy announces that the US has likely surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia in crude oil production.

Nature photographer should capture the true essence of wildlife, not forcing the poor animals to hold an umbrella, dance or do kungfu. The nature is beautiful and interesting as it is. We believe in the true beauty of nature, not fabricated, posed photo at the expense of animal rights.

Today, The Fat Of the Land is easy to swallow, even if mix of party-on and patriarchy leaves a strange taste in the mouth. As usual, Kim Deal knows the score. “Firestarter” was, after all, built on women’s work: that charmed and pissed-off “Hey!” throughout belonged to Anne Dudley, one of the virtuosos behind Art of Noise; the song’s raucous guitar line belonged to Deal, whose Breeders track “S.O.S.” birthed it. “Since I own, like, a quarter of [”Firestarter”]…I root for them since they used a song of mine,” she told the A.V. Club in 2009. “It’s like I’m in the biology club and they’re in the football team, you know?” With The Fat Of the Land, they packed the stadiums.

Academic theorists weren’t looking to destroy truth, but to diagnose its collapse.

In a column Sullivan cited a tweet by Sarah Jeong as an example of racism, failing to realize she was parodying him [...] When it comes to racism targeted at people of color, Sullivan insists both sides need to be heard. When it comes to "racism" targeted at white people, you better damn expect a 1,200 word screed attacking the speaker.

Equating generalizations made by POC about white people & those made by white people about POC strike me as disingenuous at best. they’re informed by very different lived experiences (see above) & have very different material implications (see above)

A new song, a capital S Song that persists through your life, is magic. It’s not so much like having a new dish or drink and more analogous to discovering a new color or flavor. My sight feels altered permanently, things are recontextualized.

ClickRepair is a mature, well-tested, application for declicking and decrackling audio in uncompressed audio files. It has been developed over a period of many years. There is an extensive user manual that is part of the download package. ClickRepair will not operate on compressed audio files, such as mp3, and there are no plans to incorporate such a feature.

This story was written by Portland bike fun enthusiast and Shift volunteer, One Hwang. […] Members of the public could more easily organize their own Pedalpalooza ride if they had access to a bike ride equipment library, where they could borrow for free a flat bed trailer, sound system, disco ball, batteries, and radio transmitter. Furthermore, if they receive training on how to welcome women and other underrepresented groups, they could help create a more inclusive bike community and address factors that discourage these groups from participation.

A service that automatically deletes all your tweets older than a specified age. Allows you to mass delete tweets all at once with no fee required.

Whether conscious or compulsive, whether musical or otherwise, the counting seems likely to continue. We will go on quantifying everything from our garbage to our daydreams, calculating what can’t be separated, let alone captured and kept. But we are also beginning to acknowledge measurement’s externalized costs. Music reminds us to redirect resources beyond the confines of measure. Not because the measurements don’t matter, but because we have yet to account for the movements between.

Indeed, many of the most pressing issues of the streaming music economy—artist compensation, statistical transparency, sexism—remain untouched, if not deepened, by the rise of the smart speaker. Moreover, as Amazon, Apple, and Google continue to carve out their spaces in the voice marketplace, music consumers and musicians alike will continue to fight against the companies’ preferred walled-garden approach to exclusivity. And though there’s no real reason to sympathize with Tidal or Spotify, the idea that the smart speaker industry might become the exclusive province of massive firms with enough capital to experiment (and huge captive audiences to use as guinea pigs) is significant reason for pause, no matter how little one is interested in owning the devices. A world in which three of tech’s “frightful five” become the equivalent of the major labels, with exclusive holdings in hardware and software, and plenty of incentive to lock competitors’ products and content out of their systems, is a chilling idea, and not as far-fetched as it might seem.

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The machine cost $250,000; it stood at a forbidding seven feet tall and stretched the width of the room; it could take up to 12 hours to re-calibrate if a mistake were made. The user would control for pitch, timbre, volume, and envelope for each note individually with a typewriter-like hole-punch, creating a paper script to be fed into the machine. Only the machine’s designers and engineers were even vaguely comfortable with it, and only the most intrepid of composers dared use it.

[The Philippines’] Ferdinand Marcos' greatest trick was convincing people all protesters were communist animals, so when they went missing, few cared. Even after bodies were discovered. These white people & journalists talking about being civil? These were the rich people, the Fil-Chinese, the mestizos in the Philippines who knew they won't be affected by many of Marcos' policies, and therefore could ignore them even as the killings started. Marcos was also adept at convincing regular Filipinos that "as long as you don't commit crimes I won't come for you. I'm only getting rid of the 'filth'." He lied, of course. He jailed his most vocal opponents, people whose businesses he wanted to confiscate for his use.