Derek vs. Derek (trailer) is a new (premiered at festivals, opening in London soon) UK documentary about Derek Banbury an intensive dairy farmer with 200 cows who's farm is next to Derek Gow's, a former sheep farmer, rewilding project. While both are initially combative to each other ('The man's a psychopath when it comes to hedgerows'- Guardian interview) the documentary presents Derek Banbury slowly coming around to some ideas of rewilding while Gow tries to keep the animals on his land from disrupting the work of farmers around him.

Of note is that Derek Banbury is presented as using intensive agriculture because of the pressures of modern supermarkets and capitalism, not out of any malice or greed, showing why farmers feel they have to resort to mass use of pesticides and synthetic fertilisers. The team behind the film has chosen The Farming Community Network as the charity it is urging others to donate to and is working toward having screenings in rural Britain as well as in the cities. (press release on subject) BBC Sounds interview with the director and both Dereks (who are now good friends) I haven't seen the documentary yet, but everything I've read about it sounds sweet, a little bit of brightness in the current world.

Do dolphins grieve the way humans do? A dolphin mother has carried its calf's remains for 11 days in what researchers believe could potentially reveal something new about dolphin mourning.

[Toni Morrison's] articulation of the subliminal, subaqueous life of Moby-Dick has proved the most valuable means I have of making sense of the recent violence in the United States. More than maybe anything else, this was her project as a critic; she herself recognised that the connection between novels and the world, the author and history, the past and the present, was of great importance not only to Melville and the fractious union of the 1850s, but to her own time and place: "to question the very idea of white progress, the very idea of racial superiority... and to meditate on the fraudulent, self-destroying philosophy of that superiority... that was dangerous, solitary, radical work. Especially then. Especially now."

We've never seen the Sun in this much detail before. The highest-resolution imagery of the Sun's surface ever taken reveals dizzying currents, and clues about our star's magnetic fields.

The tracker was still working on August 29th, when E7 [a female godwit] started flying southeast, over the Pacific. ... North of Kauai, she took a slight right turn and continued flying. On September 7th, after more than two hundred hours aloft, she landed at the mouth of the Piako River, back on the North Island of New Zealand.

Talk Nicer Online: poke a furry little guy and enjoy the resulting compliments [via mefi projects].

Also, Mchelly will give a penny to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

New Wild Cat Just when you thought all the cats were known. Come for the cuteness, stay for the surprisingly informative stuff on wild cat species. The link will ask for your email but it won't check your email, so.

Wiccanery - a seven-page comic by Ben Fleuter (previously) about a vampire-hunting witch. Short and simple with strong art and stronger fashion statements.

Truesdail proposed that Pauline go south, and report back on the state of Confederate defenses in central Tennessee. He warned her that the mission was hazardous and could result in her death if she were to be caught, but she readily accepted the challenge. She was then publicly evicted from the Union lines on the pretext that she was a Southern sympathizer. Cushman quickly became the darling of the Southern troops. Her good looks and her feigned interest gained her numerous invitations from Confederate officers to accompany them along their lines. In this process, she gathered important information on rebel troop strength and positions.