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It has been a long goddamn winter. (At least it has here on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, i.e. the center of the known universe.) If you and your people are anything like me and mine, all your conversations over the past few months have tended towards serious discussions of the end times—which, for the naturally melancholic among us, can be a strange comfort. "Finally," you may have thought, "people get it! I'm not alone!" But now the sun has started to come out, and today you looked around and saw all the people smiling and frolicking, and the birds were singing about how much they want to have sex with each other, and you were like, "Oh, goddammit. Why do I still feel like garbage?"

MetaFilter began in 1999 as a sort of humane proto-Reddit. Why did a site for sharing “best of the web” links become a place where strangers help each other in real life in extraordinary ways?

Spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made.

Rihanna won’t let us feel better about ourselves through her story, and she won’t even say sorry.

What do you need to know about code to survive in a suspicious world?

Stephen Colbert is ready to reinvent The Late Show. But how will he do it? And who will he be this time? The new king of late-night gives GQ a sneak peek

The fact that young people aren’t prioritizing marriage doesn’t mean they aren’t carefully considering the question of whether or not to seek a partner and marry them; it only suggests that we have other priorities in the immediate term, particularly since our generation got off to a slow start during the recession.

For the majority of white people, race is something that happens to other people. Whiteness is a default that needs no name — all deviations must be categorized and given a “race.” If race is always something that happens to other people, how are you able to see the part you play in the system? If you haven’t had to sit with your whiteness and figure out what it means in the world, how are you ever supposed to understand the system of racism that you hope to dismantle?

After a group of fans tried to guarantee a whiter, more male slate, most of the big Hugos instead went to "No Winner."

Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.

By Jessamyn West. Build moss terrariums at home. It's easy!

Tech tips for people who are going to die (someday)

As my colleague Brentin Mock points out, to observe that homicides began increasing in St. Louis before the protests is not to make a subjective interpretation, but to offer a knowable and verifiable fact. If the “Ferguson Effect” is real, how can it be that it started before the Ferguson protests? Neglecting this question is neither dispassionate nor high-minded. It is the sort of insidious “false equivalence” that so rightly irks my colleague James Fallows. “False equivalence” runs contrary to the mission to journalism—it obscures where journalists are charged with clarifying. A reasonable person could read the Times’ story and conclude that there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it. That is the path away from journalism and toward noncommittal stenography: Some people think climate change is real, some do not. Some people believe in UFOs, others doubt their existence. Some think brain cancer can be cured with roots and berries, but others say proof has yet to emerge.

In other words, the press colludes with politicians in this culture of distraction-­mongering. Meanwhile, a new class of political figures has built careers almost entirely on shiny-object status. It’s more fun than writing policy treatises and much easier than actual governing — and it pays better too.

The truth is that the obsession with word magic and names is a primitive one, inherently irrational. Names are notional. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet—or as rancid, depending; a mountain by its older name is just as tall. Yet the desire to remedy the wrongs of the past by righting our nomenclature is a deep one, and it burns on. Word magic it may be, and no more than that, but we believe in magic, and we think in words. There is, in general, an easy resolution to this problem of when we should adjust the past to the present, one neither “relativist” nor unduly pietist. We need ask merely, What was the most humane view being widely urged at the time, and does the name or people we honor celebrate that?

Confident black men are constantly held under by society, frequently told to not say much and accept what society (i.e. the whims of white men in power) gives us. This is a tactic to hold us “in place,” to make sure we don’t “overstep our boundaries” (i.e. gain a level of influence as to overthrow the people in power, which, again, are a bunch of white dudes). We as black men are treated as secondary, even though our efforts have created some of the greatest art forms our society has been given. And when we hold onto our dignity by believing in ourselves, we are conditioned to hold it at a distance so as not to upset those nebulous powers that be.

Bands who don’t license their music, like Pearl Jam and R.E.M., have zero songs on this list of timeless music. What was a choice driven by integrity at the time couldn’t possibly have anticipated how much we now allow our media consumption to drive our music preferences. Some of the most important bands in music history will be lost in favor of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”, which is the most timeless song of the 1980s at this point, because a high school kid on an MTV reality show wanted Journey to be playing when he met his girlfriend.

With 50 plus opaquely named services, we decided that enough was enough and that some plain English descriptions were needed.

Interviewed by Choire Sicha. “There's always room for another story. There's always room for another tune, right?”

The sneering condescension and pearl-clutching panic about young people's relationship to sex and technology willfully misses the fruits of an impressive creative movement.

Also, take more of them. But better.

When white people educate themselves and begin to get an understanding of just how bad things still are, it can feel like a crushing weight. They might feel guilty, sad, overwhelmed. What are you supposed to do with this information? It seems unfixable and like there’s nothing you can do. I can’t give you any comforting words about this stage. This is the stage I spend my life in, to some degree. The difference is that now you understand that as a white person, you have the choice, the privilege of choosing not to think about it–because that’s one of the luxuries of fitting in to the dominant group. Now you know the answer to the question, “Why is she always talking about race?”

The Golden Age of sci-fi was just as politically-charged as today. The only difference is that the writers’ opinions aligned more closely to yours—or, maybe you didn’t pick up on the political messages the first time you read them because you were just a kid.

It’s great that you want to educate other white folks about racism. That is exactly what we need you to be doing. But THINK before you go dragging the nearest Black person into your fight, about whether you’re doing more harm than good.

Writer and musician Sean Gray discusses the experience of going to shows at venues without access for the disabled.

Good names are difficult to come up with. And if you’ve found one: have you considered what your potential name might mean in another language? What if it’s something obscene? WordSafety.com checks your word against swear words and unwanted associations in 19 languages. We also do phonetic matching, so you can catch pronounciations that might be problematic.

Celebrities being silly.

We have police aggression against black people because the white moneyed classes of this country have demanded aggressive policing and the moneyed control our policy. We have police aggression because the War on Drugs provokes it and we still have a War on Drugs because the War on Drugs puts vast amounts of tax dollars in the hands of police departments and a voracious prison industrial complex. We have police aggression against black people because centuries of gerrymandering and political manipulation have been undertaken with the explicit purpose of empowering some people and disenfranchising others. None of that can be solved through having pure hearts and pure minds. Racism is not a problem of mind. Racism cannot be combated by individuals not being racist. A pure heart makes no difference. In response to systemic injustice, you’ve got to change the systems themselves. It’s the only thing that will ever work.

No. When I was a kid with a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), sometimes my games wouldn't load. But I, like all kids, knew the secret: take out the game cartridge, blow on the contacts, and put it back in. And it seemed to work. (When it failed, I'd just keep trying until it worked.) But looking back, did blowing into the cartridge really help? I've talked to the experts, reviewed a study on this very topic, and have the answer.

King’s political courage at the end of his life found him on the wrong side of sitting American presidents, mainstream liberal thought leaders and the national racial status quo. Remarkably, King tapped into what he characterized as “those great wells of democracy” to reveal the depth and breadth of racial and economic injustice despite America’s insistence that civil rights laws had ushered in a new age of citizenship and justice.