Everything about the new H. naledi bones is so fascinating I cannot DEAL with it:
Most pressing of all: how to get it out again, and quickly, before some other amateurs found their way into that chamber. (It was clear from the arrangement of the bones that someone had already been there, perhaps decades before.) Tucker and Hunter lacked the skills needed to excavate the fossils, and no scientist Berger knew—certainly not himself—had the physique to squeeze through that chute. So Berger put the word out on Facebook: Skinny individuals wanted, with scientific credentials and caving experience; must be “willing to work in cramped quarters.” Within a week and a half he’d heard from nearly 60 applicants. He chose the six most qualified; all were young women. Berger called them his “underground astronauts.”
Choire interviewed noted genius Ursula K. Le Guin:
SICHA: There’s a sort of growing professional class of writers that may not have had access to being a professional. Before the internet, you would go to your terrible job and then you would write at night. I actually found that system really rewarding, separating out the money and the work.
LE GUIN: On the other hand, if it was a nine-to-five job, and if you had any family obligations and commitments, it’s terribly hard. It worked very much against women, because they were likely to have the nine-to-five job and really be responsible for the household. Doing two jobs is hard enough, but doing three is just impossible. And that’s essentially what an awful lot of women who wanted to write were being asked to do: support themselves, keep the family and household going, and write.
Filled with mourning for the Key and Peele sketches that never made it to air:
Dodgeball
This scene involved adult dodgeball players. Keegan plays this spazzy guy who keeps on getting hit with the ball but denies that he’s been hit. For a lot of people, this might be thin on the page, but Keegan would do it a hilariously physical way — him jumping around, and then everyone getting more and more angry, but feeling stupid for getting so angry about a meaningless game of dodgeball. That one died because we felt like you had a concept that you might think should be the comic premise in and of itself — that adults were playing dodgeball — and it was again a high threshold, a difficult thing to have adults playing kids.
A special guest star today! Anne Helen Petersen’s puppy likes the sun:
Peak sexy, the Ryan Phillippe edition:
First of all, Sebastian’s a total prick, which probably is part of his appeal. I mean, it certainly isn’t the N*SYNC-era Timberlake curls he’s sporting, or the chunky turtleneck sweaters that look like they were pulled from a sale rack at Structure. No, it’s the attitude, the obsessive nature of his vindictiveness, his overwhelming desire to fuck his step-sister Kathryn Merteuil (played by a perfectly devilish Sarah Michelle Gellar) that he’ll go out of his way to seduce (poor thing) the angelic prude Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon, in the role that saw her shirk off her previous sexpot image seen in movies likePleasantville and Freeway and rebrand her as the girl next door).
Oh, and there was that pool scene.
Afforable housing issues in Canada:
Affordable-housing advocates say soaring rents in the suburbs are a symptom of a lack of low-cost rental supply in the major cities, where the bulk of the new rental stock has come from high-priced, investor-owned condos. That has pushed many low-income workers, particularly those working in the downtown service industry, farther away from the core in search of housing.
“Eventually you can only move so far,” said Sharad Kerur, executive director of the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association. “If you are a service industry worker at the Royal York Hotel, how much farther can you go out to find a home until you start to say, ‘I can’t do this any more?’”
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Under NO circumstances should you Google streetview the house you grew up in, it will break you:
