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When Bat Boy Escaped The FBI And The Alien Endorsed Bill Clinton: An Oral History Of ‘Weekly World News’

“At the height of its popularity in the late 1980s, circulation reached 1.2 million copies per week. Headlines like ‘Bigfoot Kept Lumberjack as Love Slave’ ruled its covers. A team of dedicated journalists filled its pages with satirical fiction. If fact happened to stumble its way inside, it would be adjusted to fit the paper’s mission statement.” Here, from the people who worked there, is the story of everyone’s real favorite supermarket tabloid. – Mental Floss

What Happened To The Lost Colony Of Roanoke Island? Researchers Say They Have The Answer

It’s American history’s oldest mystery: in 1587, 100-odd colonists sent by Walter Raleigh settled on Roanoke Island in what is now North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Within a few weeks, their leader had to go back to England for supplies, and he wasn’t able to return for three years. When he finally did, he found the settlement abandoned — with the word “CROATOAN” carved on a post. No Europeans ever found the missing Roanoke settlers, and there’s been speculation ever since about what became of them. Now a writer working with a group of archaeologists says that the solution to this puzzle has been hiding in plain sight all along. – The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.)

Collective Of Black Classical Musicians Takes To Social Media To Detail Issues

“Almost every aspect of classical music, as it is currently, cultivates a toxic and racist culture. That doesn’t mean that every participant in classical music is racist, obviously. The specific aspects that sustain institutional racism are: hero worship; classism and elitism; unbalanced power structures (like the relationship between students and private teachers; the fear-based mentality that your teacher can “make or break you”); access to quality education and opportunities, especially for lower socioeconomic students—classical music is cost prohibitive for many prospective practitioners; respectability politics and classical musician stereotypes that serve to flush out individuality (for example, the flak that Yuja Wang gets for wearing short skirts is endemic of classical music’s respectability politics rooted in the intersections of classical music and Christian worship—the altar, god-figures, etc.); the way classical music history is taught as a sanitized, sexist, queerphobic, whitewashed, and white supremacist version of history; lack of reporting protocols for racism; the way orchestras are funded and governed by “pay-to-play” boards;
“outreach programs” that are missionary-like PR campaigns. We could go on…and it is our page’s work to address all of these issues.” – Grammy.com

Advertisers And Media Outlets Are Fighting, With Billions Of Dollars At Stake, And Nobody Really Knows How To Fix It

“It’s easy to pin the current squabbles on the coronavirus. Look more closely, and you’ll see evidence of deeper frustrations at play that marketers and media outlets have known about for years but haven’t done enough to fix. … Since the industry agreed to changes in the way Nielsen measures TV ratings in 2007, viewership patterns have grown exponentially more complex — and everyone, it seems, has a different vision of how to calculate the number of people who watch a favorite comedy or drama; a sports event; and a newscast.” – Variety

More COVID Innovation: A Drive-Through Art Exhibition

Leave it to the ingenious Dutch. With both the Rotterdam Ahoy conference and exhibition center and the city’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen closed due to the pandemic, the two institutions got together to use the Ahoy’s large space to display video installations that visitors can view from vehicles. Electric cars only; if you don’t have one, you can borrow one on site. – Deutsche Welle