Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "We just launched a new scorecard showing where major music festivals stand when it comes to using invasive and racially biased facial recognition… Read the rest of the article: Which music festivals use facial recognition tech?
Raffi Cavoukian (AKA "Raffi") is best known as a beloved children's singer — I vividly remember attending one of his concerts as a child — and possibly secondarily as the… Read the rest of the article: Raffi's new songs about kids, climate emergency, and Greta Thunberg
I'm in the midst of couple of weeks' worth of lectures, public events and teaching, and you can catch me in Toronto (for Seeding Utopias and Resisting Dystopias and 6… Read the rest of the article: Come see me in Toronto and Maine!
Bernie Sanders has pledged to eliminate the $81b in outstanding US medical debt if he is elected president in 2020.
The tech ethics movement has progressed to the point where various practitioners are trying to come up with a kind of oath of service, not unlike the fiduciary principle, or… Read the rest of the article: Towards a "nerdocratic oath"
Since her stories started appearing in 2013, Sarah Pinsker (previously) has been a writer to watch, winning prestigious awards from the Nebula to the Sturgeon; now, in her debut novel,… Read the rest of the article: Sarah Pinsker's "Song for a New Day": outstanding dystopian rock-and-roll novel of rebellion and redemption
When I was a kid, my whole circle of D&D-playing, science-fiction reading pals was really into Roger Zelazny's ten-volume Chronicles of Amber, but somehow I never read it; for years,… Read the rest of the article: The lost audiobooks of Roger Zelazny reading the Chronicles of Amber
Last week, a drone video showing hundreds of people in China being shackled and blindfolded and made to kneel on a train platform went viral; a piece of amazing digital… Read the rest of the article: Authenticating a video showing hundreds of kneeling people in shackles and blindfolds on a Chinese railroad platform
I have an op-ed in today's Globe and Mail, "Why do people believe the Earth is flat?" wherein I connect the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise in actual… Read the rest of the article: Why do people believe the Earth is flat?
In 2017, Banksy painted a giant mural on a wall in Dover, England depicting a worker chiseling a star off the EU flag, by way of a comment on the… Read the rest of the article: Banksy celebrates the erasure of his Brexit mural: "I guess a big white flag says it just as well"
On the occasion of the publication of Permanent Record, a memoir of Edward Snowden's journey from gung-ho would-be special forces sergeant to CIA and NSA spy to whistleblower — a… Read the rest of the article: Ed Snowden says he'll stand trial and even go to prison in the USA if he can have a public trial and mount a public interest defense
The jellyfish shot combines a sickly sweet collection of liqueurs (blue curacao and sambuca) with vodka and a drop of cream to make a cocktail that is gorgeous to admire,… Read the rest of the article: Jellyfish shot: an admiring cocktail
My latest LA Times book review is for Naomi Klein's new essay collection, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, which traces more than a decade of… Read the rest of the article: On Fire: Naomi Klein's book is a time-series of the shift from climate denial to nihilism to Green New Deal hope
In an interview with Bloomberg, Bill Gates dismissed the idea of breakups as a remedy for Big Tech's monopolistic market concentration; Gates said that breaking up an abusive company will… Read the rest of the article: Bill Gates: if we break up Big Tech, we'll just have more bad companies
An investigation by Propublica and Bayerischer Rundfunk found 187 servers hosting more than 5,000,000 patients' confidential medical records and scans (including a mix of Social Security numbers, home addresses and… Read the rest of the article: Propublica finds millions of Americans' medical images and data sitting on unprotected, publicly accessible servers
Anna Merlan has made a distinguished journalistic career out of covering conspiracy theories, particularly far-right ones, for Gizmodo Media; her book-length account of conspiratorial thinking, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy… Read the rest of the article: Republic of Lies: the rise of conspiratorial thinking and the actual conspiracies that fuel it
Esme Pearl has a shitty life: she's seventeen, has only one real friend in the world, lives in a small Kansas town (and hates it), goes to high school, and… Read the rest of the article: The Babysitter's Coven
Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is a Lord of the Rings Hobbit, one of the few, rare female characters in that series, and she's a nasty piece of work: a bitter enemy of… Read the rest of the article: Tolkien's Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is probably a misogynist satire of women's rights campaigner Victoria Sackville-West
Thomas Piketty, the French economist behind 2014's game-changing Capital in the 21st Century, has a new book, Capital and Ideology (out in France now, coming in English in 2020), which… Read the rest of the article: Piketty on the "Brahmin left" and the "merchant right"
The Sackler family got richer than the Rockefellers through their role in creating and sustaining the opioid crisis, which took more American lives than the Vietnam war.
