What’s not fine is the insidious effort to fill this vacuum by the very forces that cleared it out. The major studios, having funneled all of Earth’s money into their coffers through an annual handful of multi-hundred-million-dollar franchise-related paydays and/or the boardroom jockeying of venture capital, now want only for critical respect and the street cred of coolness. As the fanbases of superheroes and their ilk try their darndest to demand these markers of validity, raising an uproar every time a tentpole dips below the Certified Fresh line on Rotten Tomatoes and tweet-swarming those with the temerity to diverge from this enforced consensus, the films themselves have begun to meet them halfway. A troubling trend has taken shape, in which conglomerate output affects the appearance of exploitation and its adjacent traditions, without any of the underlying motivations or aesthetic daring that might threaten mass marketability.

It is a truth (nearly) universally acknowledged that birds exist. It is a truth somewhat less universally acknowledged that a portion of them are “birbs”: a somewhat ambiguous online avian classification encompassing the small (usually), the round (often), and the cute (always). To create clarity around this popular meme, Audubon proposed a set of carefully considered rules for parsing the birbs from the birds. Among the masses, a great rejoicing rang out—as well as much debate. And amid the hubbub came further questions: What about the other words that the internet, in its unending love of neologisms, has bestowed upon birds? What about “borbs” and “floofs”? Where do they fit into Audubon’s taxonomic rankings?

A modest investigation into whether the French writer indulged in an unusual fetish.

A March paper in Trends in Genetics holds the unorthodox explanation: The gene became part of the smelt genome through a direct horizontal transfer from a herring. It wasn’t through hybridization, because herring and smelt can’t crossbreed, as many failed attempts have shown. The herring gene made its way into the smelt genome outside the normal sexual channels

Recent epidemics have provided one way of gaining crucial clues about what these underlying causes might be. Far from being unique to Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19 – some scientists believe almost all infectious outbreaks leave behind a proportion of patients who remain chronically unwell with symptom patterns similar to long Covid. This is known as the "long tail" of epidemics. By studying survivors of the Sars coronavirus outbreaks of the early 2000s, and the West Africa Ebola crisis of the past decade, a handful of scientists think they know why it happens.

The insurgents, some adopting a pirate motif, believe that the denomination has drifted too far to the left on issues of race, gender and the strict authority of the Bible.

The I.R.S. almost never audits private equity firms, even as whistle-blowers have filed claims alleging illegal tax avoidance.

Houston Methodist was the first U.S. hospital to mandate employee vaccines and suspended 170 who refused. The dismissal could have a ripple effect.

NBC's upcoming series "Ultimate Slip 'N Slide" has halted production after dozens of crew members fell ill with "awful explosive diarrhea" on set

PUNACA TINTA MARIA, Bolivia (AP) — For many generations, the homeland of the Uru people here wasn't land at all: It was the brackish waters of Lake Poopo. The Uru — “people of the water” — would build a sort of family island of reeds when they married and would survive on what they could harvest from the broad, shallow lake in the highlands of southwestern Bolivia.

Scheepens, 61, says he is the 19th generation of farmers in his family, and that after years practising as a vet, he is driven by an unusual set of ambitions: “emancipating” farm animals, putting animal welfare first, and eating far less, far happier meat.

Jeffrey Toobin returned to CNN as the network's chief legal analyst on Thursday, eight months after he exposed himself during a Zoom call with colleagues at The New Yorker.

Chief Leonard Crow Dog, a renowned spiritual leader and Native American rights activist who fought for sovereignty, language preservation and religious freedom, has died at age 78. Crow Dog, Sicangu Lakota Oyate, passed away June 6 at Crow Dog’s Paradise on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota after a battle with cancer, Indian Country Today reported.

The Crime Against Nature by Solicitation statute, passed in an 1980’s era of gay panic, unfairly targets queer sex workers to this day.

“I was completely inside (the whale); it was completely black,” said Michael Packard of Wellfleet.

Staging the Olympics amid a state of emergency and a coronavirus upsurge has led top officials to question whether they should happen at all.

Pastor Tony Spell, who made a name for himself by violating safety regulations during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, was ticketed this past week for killing an alligator near his church.

To combat concerns about ideological indoctrination, the Nevada Family Alliance has proposed outfitting teachers with body cameras to ensure they aren’t indoctrinating students in classrooms.

In the wake of the killing of the Afzaal-Salman family in London, Ontario, Muslim Canadians told VICE World News Islamophobia is palpable in their daily lives, but not enough people care.

In a sweeping overhaul of Texas elections law that Republicans rushed toward approval in the waning hours of the legislative session, one provision stood out to critics as particularly alarming. The hastily-added clause would have made it easy for a judge to overturn an election, even if there were only thin evidence of fraud. With former President Donald Trump’s historic efforts to nullify his November loss still fresh in their minds, Democrats singled out the measure as irresponsible. “Just think about that — your election, YOUR election could be overturned without the other side being required to prove actual voter fraud,” said state Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Carrolton, in an impassioned speech on the floor of the Texas House. “The implications of this are unthinkable. To make matters worse, the provision was not in either the Senate or the House version of the bill.”