Writing on Crooked Timber, John Quiggin (previously) responds to the epidemic of elderly reactionaries piling vitriol and violent rhetoric on the child activist Greta Thunberg and asks, why not let… Read the rest of the article: The case for allowing children to vote
Leaked emails reveal that Washington state rep Matt Shea has "close ties" with Team Rugged, a white nationalist/Christian fundamentalist terror organization that trains children, teens and young men to fight… Read the rest of the article: Washington state rep Matt Shea secretly backed and organized terror-training camps to create child soldiers to fight in a race war
Crystal Liu is the actor who plays Mulan in Disney's live-action reboot; on Weibo, she has been publishing messages in support of the Hong Kong police, who have been brutally… Read the rest of the article: Call for boycott after the actor who played Mulan in the reboot supports Hong Kong's brutal police crackdown on pro-democracy protestors
The Critics Company is a collective of Nigerian teen afrofuturist filmmakers who make incredible looking, smart science fiction movies with camerawork courtesy of old, busted mobile phones and VFX generated… Read the rest of the article: Check out these amazing sf movies made by Nigerian teens
Even by Elizabeth Warren's high standards, her plan for "honoring and empowering tribal nations and indigenous peoples is detailed, ambitious, and important.
Well before the collapse of Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme — the largest in world history! — accounting investigator Harry Markopolos had publicly accused Madoff of running a scam; now he… Read the rest of the article: The guy who figured out Bernie Madoff's scam now says GE is about to go bankrupt
Tumblr is being sold to WordPress parent company Automattic for a reported price of "less than $3m," a substantial decline from the $1.1B Yahoo paid for the company in 2013… Read the rest of the article: Announcement of Tumblr's sale to WordPress classified as pornography by Tumblr's notorious "adult content" filter
One of the smartest, most interesting people I ever knew once told me about a time when he got really interested in the problem of calculating the orbits of the… Read the rest of the article: Timelapse of the Milky Way with the sky held motionless and the Earth rotating
Last week at Defcon, a security researcher named Smea presented their findings on vulnerabilities in the Lovesense Hush, an internet-of-things buttplug that has already been shown to have critical privacy… Read the rest of the article: Penetration tester releases proof-of-concept code for hijacking smart buttplugs
Few states have voting machines that are simultaneously more obviously defective and more ardently defended by the state government than Georgia, where 16-year-old touchscreen systems are prone to reporting ballots… Read the rest of the article: Judge orders the State of Georgia to be prepared for pen-and-paper balloting by March 2020
The Folio Society has announced a series of volumes paying tribute to the history of Marvel Comics, the inaugural volume was originally scheduled to feature an introduction from Art Spiegelman,… Read the rest of the article: Art Spiegelman pulled his Marvel Folio Society intro after Disney demanded that he not criticize Trump
Jonathan Mann (previously) writes, "Like many people, I've been disturbed by the borg-like tweets coming out of the Amazon Ambassador program. I took a few of the bleakest ones and… Read the rest of the article: The saddest song: setting the "Amazon Ambassador" borg-tweets to music
The Wall Street Journal investigates major corporations' ad buyers' practice of blacklisting of ads on news stories that deal with the world's most urgent issues, including any news story that… Read the rest of the article: Major corporations blacklist ads on news stories that include the words "Trump," "racism," "gun," "Brexit," "suicide" and more
In 1978, anti-taxation extremists managed to get a California ballot measure, Proposition 13, passed, and with it, they managed to effectively end the ability of cities to provide services to… Read the rest of the article: In California, the 2020 elections will feature an epic battle to allow cities to reinstate property taxes
Jan Hakon Erichsen is a Norwegian artist whose Destruction Diaries series chronicles his creation of a series of bizarre, whimsical and delightful machines for popping balloons and undertaking other acts… Read the rest of the article: Artist builds delightful, impractical Rube Goldberg machines for popping balloons
Ant Lab's Adrian Smith (previously) writes, "No one had ever filmed how ants inject venom when they sting something. I study ants and I make videos, so I went to… Read the rest of the article: 1000fps video reveals the underlying action of a stinging ant's venom injection for the very first time
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the winners of this year's Pioneer Award (rechristened the "Barlow" in honor of EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow: sf writer William Gibson, anthropologist danah… Read the rest of the article: William Gibson, danah boyd and Oakland Privacy will all receive this year's EFF's Pioneer Award
Nelsie writes, "Twitter user tweeting about inhuman conditions at Amazon warehouses gets brigaded by tag-team of warehouse workers who are paid to tweet about working at Amazon warehouses two days… Read the rest of the article: Amazon pays happy warehouse workers to tweet about how happy they are whenever someone complains about warehouse conditions
Financial disclosures from Wework in support of its IPO reveal that the company loses almost $5,200/customer, and that it hemorrhaged $1.3B in the first half of 2019.
Despite the departure of its most prominent leaders amid claims of harassment and retaliation, the Googler Uprising lives on, with Google employees circulating an internal petition demanding that the company… Read the rest of the article: Googlers circulate petition demanding a moratorium on contracts with US border agencies
