In Kendrick Lamar's new single "Humble", he references the game Tetris: Pull up on your block, then break it down: we playin' Tetris A.M. to the P.M., P.M. to the A.M., funk I'm not quite sure what the reference to Tetris is supposed to mean. I've seen several different interpretations of...

The video version of Kendrick Lamar's single Humble begins with the following three lines: Wicked or weakness You gotta see this Waaaaay (yeah, yeah!) However, the version of the song on streaming sites like spotify opens with three different lines: Nobody pray for me It's been th...

Kendrick Lamar's "King Kunta" contains several references to yams. For example: When you got the yams—(What's the yams?) The yam is the power that be You can smell it when I'm walkin' down the street (Oh yes, we can, oh yes, we can) I'm not quite sure why yams are so important to t...

This has bugged me for years too; I have full edit rights over my own posts, I can single-handedly approve or reject any edit suggested to them if I catch it in time, why can't I override an approval or rejection if an edit happens to get reviewed while I'm asleep? Well, now we can! Oded toiled...

Now that we have a community-run Twitter account, I'd like to know if we could use Stack Exchange's logo for this site as the profile picture for the Twitter account. I'd noticed that the Mi Yodeyan Twitter account uses their Stack Exchange logo as their profile picture. (I assume they asked perm...

It's already established that we're using language-based tags for questions about e.g. french-literature, russian-literature, german-literature, and so on. How should we apply this to questions about Nordic/Scandinavian literature? Scandinavia consists of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and usuall...

Using different tags for the different countries would only make sense for relatively modern literature. If we had separate norwegian-literature and swedish-literature tags, which would we use for a question about a book produced in Norway, written in what we might now call Norwegian, while Nor...

Like Mi Yodeya and some other sites, Literature now has a community-maintained Twitter account! This account is not run by SE robots; Stack Exchange stopped doing that some time ago. At this point, the account is run by me; however, you can still get involved! (Please do!) Here are some things t...

In Art Spiegelman's Maus, he represents different people from different countries as different animals. For instance, he represents the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Polish as pigs, the Americans as dogs, and the French people as frogs. How were these choices representative of the differ...

TL;DR: whether or not a question is based on homework should be mostly irrelevant to how we treat it, unless there's some cheating or other unethical behaviour going on. Here's my basic rationale: every question should be evaluated on its own merits. Our goal is to build a repository of great qu...

Back in April of 2010, Joel shared our assumptions about the role of small sites in the newly minted Stack Exchange network: If a site does not have enough activity at the end of 90 days, it will be closed down. Any existing Q&A will be archived and made available for download, but the site...

Cool. This is where we have to be extremely careful, and extremely vigilant. At least one user has told me that this is the most active private beta they've been in so far. It's really tempting, therefore, to sit back and assume that we've got it all in the bag for another few weeks, because we'...

Some data to complement the sketch given by Gilles. I picked two recent graduates and two beta sites that are just about to graduate. The graphs show posts per day. I used moderate smoothing, trying not to lose the sharp peak at the beginning. Workplace graduated 2014-02-21 Money graduat...

I've been noticing a lot of meta questions asking whether or not some tag should be created/destroyed are including a "tag score sheet" copied from this meta post. That score sheet seems to have been copied from another Stack Exchange site and slightly modified for the effort described in that qu...

Before you start doing anything, put a little bit of thought into the request: Does this tag even need to be burninated? There are a lot of burninate-requests posted to various meta sites that are... To put it gently... A complete and utter waste of everyone's time. Some folks will seemingly p...

Sigh. Critical responses to Beatrice and Virgil have a tendency to completely miss the point of what is a sophisticated and innovative book. I suppose it's understandable when it's just one blog post, but when The New York Times and The Washington Post do the same thing... I suppose it's fine if ...

While I was doing some research, looking for an answer for Are Frog and Toad more than just friends?, I found this article listing 15 fictional characters the author thinks are probably gay. Some of them are widely joked about (Bert and Ernie, Peter Pan), but two characters on the list were deepl...