Emergency rooms at for-profit hospitals are notorious price-gougers, where an ice-pack and a bandage can cost $5,000, and where no one will tell you how much your care is costing… Read the rest of the article: Ha-ha, only serious: McSweeney's on price-gouging in the emergency room
This year, I helped University of Chicago science fiction writer and renaissance scholar Ada Palmer and science historian Adrian Johns host a series of interdisciplinary seminars on "Censorship, Information Control,… Read the rest of the article: Videos from the University of Chicago "Censorship and Information Control" seminar
Hawaiian monk seals are endangered and closely monitored by NOAA scientists who are alarmed that the seals keep getting eels stuck really deep in their nostrils.
I'm heading to San Francisco next week for a launch party on December 11th celebrating the release of The End of Trust, a collaboration between EFF and McSweeney's on internet… Read the rest of the article: San Franciscans! Come celebrate the launch of the EFF/McSweeney's special privacy issue with me on Dec 11!
Joel Bonasera liked my novel Walkaway so much that he made a 3D-printable bookmark based on Will Stahle's amazing cover art!
Back when Livejournal purged its NSFW fanficcers and other text-based purveyors of delightful smut, users flocked to Dreamwidth, a small, indie, smut-tolerant community run as much as a labor of… Read the rest of the article: Every NSFWpocalypse sends users to small, indie platforms, who are threatened by the same factors that make no-platforming practical
What do you do if you want to complain about your job but your employer is the poster-child for surveillance capitalism? Buy a burner phone.
In 2017, Pricewaterhousecooper published Using science fiction to explore business innovation, a guide for corporations that wanted to work with sf writers to think about the future of their businesses;… Read the rest of the article: PWC recommended that corporations should ask science fiction writers about the future
I first learned about Liberator sex-furniture from the amazing sex-positive webcomic Oh Joy Sex Toy: the company makes foam wedges, half-spheres, pillows and even loungers that help couples (or more!)… Read the rest of the article: America's largest sex-furniture manufacturer pays well, sources locally, and is profitable and fast-growing
Qanon is an unbelievably stupid conspiracy theory whose underlying bullshittery is mathematically provable, and whose primary proponents are pallsy with the President, and whose adherents include mass-murderers whose crimes are… Read the rest of the article: #D5: Advice for people who just realized that Qanon is bullshit
Robbo writes, "Gerald Casale, founder of DEVO, has written an open letter in response to the band being inducted into the Rock 'N' Roll Hall Of Fame."
Remember when Malcolm Turnbull, the goddamned idiot who was briefly Prime Minister of Australia, was told that the laws of mathematics mean that there was no way to make a… Read the rest of the article: Australia just voted to ban working cryptography. No, really.
Researchers at Flinders University knocked out a gene known as RCAN1 in mice, hypothesizing that this would increase "non-shivering thermogenesis," which "expends calories as heat rather than storing them as… Read the rest of the article: Mice given an experimental gene therapy don't get fat, regardless of caloric intake
The BACU Association — the folks behind the incredible brutalist Socialist Modernism Tumblr — have announced a limited run, 800-copy book collecting photos and details on 242 Socialist Modernist "objects"… Read the rest of the article: A guide to the Socialist Modernist Architecture of Romania and Moldova
Liartown, USA is Sean Tejaratchi's (previously) incredible, longrunning visual surreal satire site, and it is the latest casualty of parent company Verizon's decision to purge the site of all NSFW… Read the rest of the article: Liartown, USA leaves Tumblr over NSFW-ban; announces new 544-page Crap Hound book "devoted to images notable for their lack of positivity"
Boing Boing pal Laura Hudson is helming a new project at The Verge called "Better Worlds," an anthology of ten science fiction stories written by diverse authors; half of them… Read the rest of the article: Better Worlds: "a science fiction project about hope"
Jamie Dimon is CEO of Jpmorgan Chase, the massive bank that settled a $13 billion mortgage fraud case with the DoJ in 2013 by committing more mortgage frauds to raise… Read the rest of the article: Jamie Dimon is getting fed up with the protesters who "occupy" him everywhere he goes
According to Wells Fargo, a "computer glitch" caused the improper denial of 870 loan modification requests, which led to 545 foreclosures in which Wells Fargo customers lost their homes; the… Read the rest of the article: Wells Fargo blames "computer glitch" for its improper foreclosure on 545 homes
Since 1959, patients undergoing eye exams have stared at eye-charts whose limited set of characters was created by Louise Sloan; now, the typographer Fábio Duarte Martins has completed the font… Read the rest of the article: Optician Sans: a font based on eye-charts
Every year, NYU's nonprofit, critical activist group AI Now releases a report on the state of AI, with ten recommendations for making machine learning systems equitable, transparent and fail-safe (2016,… Read the rest of the article: The third annual AI Now report: 10 more ways to make AI safe for human flourishing
