Society

"A guy you used to hang out with and liked but weren't close to and haven't talked to in years and then is dead out of nowhere on Facebook" is one of those things I haven't gotten used to despite it happening with increasing regularity. A type of grieving that

Massachusetts passed historic police certification reform. But even with the POST Commission, the public can’t see which cops have been part of the “officer shuffle.”

David Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, spoke at the Fast Company Innovation Festival on inspiring young people to run for office.

Everyone agrees that money laundering laws apply to DeFi. The question is: how to apply them? DeFi, or decentralized finance , is an emergin...

We struggle to secure payslips or a schedule – and in an 11-hour shift I barely have time for a bathroom break, says Czech journalist Saša Uhlová

The recent Second Circuit decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive is only the latest battle in the war on libraries and the freedom to read.

Curtis Guy Yarvin, also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger. He is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement (NRx).

The Dark Enlightenment, also called the neo-reactionary movement (sometimes abbreviated to NRx), is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian,[1] reactionary philosophical and political movement. The term "Dark Enlightenment" is a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment and apologia for the public view of the "Dark Ages".

Nick Land (born 17 January 1962) is an English philosopher, who has been described as "the Godfather of accelerationism".[2] His work has been tied to the development of speculative realism.[3][4] He was a leader of the 1990s "theory-fiction" collective Cybernetic Culture Research Unit after its original founder cyberfeminist theorist Sadie Plant departed from it.[5][6] His work departs from the formal conventions of academic writing and embraces a wide range of influences, as well as exploring unorthodox and "dark" philosophical interests.[7]

China has long expressed concern that the United States could use Space X’s Starlink satellite network in the event of a potential contingency in the region. However, with their latest experiment, the scientists have allegedly demonstrated that China could exploit Starlink to its own advantage instead. In a recent experiment, a Chinese scientist and his […]

Down below we have a lovely career-spanning essay on the music of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and a review of their latest album Woodland. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it. You can also go directly to it here. Thank you for supporting this newsletter if

None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom

Another group of smirking techbros have decided that rich people shouldn't have to follow the same rules as the poors. There's an app for that. LineLeap, backed by Y Combinator, lets people pay to skip lines at bars. LineLeap makes money by charging Ticketmaster-style convenience fees for certain passes. The company also imposes fees for "newfound revenue" on venues -- that is, revenue that ...

They're the epitome of romance, glamour and status — but also have a dark side. A look at the many meanings of diamonds.

What started as an economic system has become an all-encompassing force. That wasn't inevitable. NPR's Throughline examines a project that has taken hundreds of years — and is still developing.

Companies have no way back from a sudden loss of trust

Revanchism is the political manifestation of the will to reverse the territorial losses which are incurred by a country, frequently after a war or after a social movement. As a term, revanchism originated in 1870s France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War among nationalists who wanted to avenge the French defeat and reclaim the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine.

The broadcaster said the tech bosses' companies had released "toxic particulates" into cultural life.

In a series of surveys, researchers studied when and why voters put up with inaccurate statements from their leaders.

PLDB: a Programming Language Database. Build the next great programming language.

Maroussia Lévesque considers "analog privilege" and what understanding it can tell us about the detrimental effects of AI systems.

Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff take apart widespread myths about Federal spending and debts.

From TikTok to Two Hot Takes, everyone sucks here.

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan […]

Thirteenth in the News Commons series. I grabbed the spottedhawk.org domain after hearing Garrison Keilor read this passage from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself over Leo Kottke improvising on g…

She homed in on a dangerous weakness.