For all the ways in which Serial is and isn’t what it should be, or what we want it to be, maybe it demonstrates the fictionality of criminal justice, by believing it to death. Sarah Koenig’s belief is very white, as lots of commentators have observed or complained; she has a kind of naivete about how the system works—a naive expectation that it does work—that rubs a lot of people the wrong way, especially as she observes that it doesn’t. She expects a good faith search for the truth on the part of the criminal justice system, and repeatedly finds nothing of the kind. And then she looks for it again. She suspends her disbelief, all the more when—at the end of the show—she puts things in the hands of the Innocence Project and the Reddit detectives. Let them sort it out. Let them continue. Let them keep going with it. She had a radio franchise to continue, a season two to plan.

The problem is not that the online self is “inauthentic” and the offline self is real; it’s that the self derived from the data processing of our digital traces doesn’t correspond with our active efforts to shape an offline/online hybrid identity for our genuine social ties. What seems necessary instead is a way to augment our sense of “transindividuality,” in which social being doesn’t come at the expense of individuality. This might be a way out of the trap of capitalist subjectivity, and the compulsive need to keep serially producing in a condition of anxiety to seem to manifest and discover the self as some transcendent thing at once unfettered by and validated through social mediation. Instead of using social media to master the social component of our own identity, we must use them to better balance the multitudes within.

It’s time for Asian American men to stop being the “Model Minority” in tech. We all know tech is excluding most people from participating. But one group is actually over represented. And we’ve been conspicuously silent.

Fetty Wap has transcended his initial audience and is now a burgeoning pop star, but that doesn't make his song about cooking cocaine with his girlfriend fair game. The power of the song is in already its juxtapositions—it's a love song steeped in culling a hard option from dire circumstances; it’s a manifestation of street level feminism replete with his and her Lamborghinis and coed trips to the strip club. Subjecting it to full-press hipster racism doesn't make any new observations. In fact, it takes away from them. When young George Dalton sings about making pies with his baby, he's talking about actual pies, not cooking crack, which is a huge poetic step backward. One has to ask: Where are the parents here? But that's how white supremacy functions: If this were a Black child, it would ring as an indictment on the decaying structure of the Black family. But, because Dalton is white, it's "cute".

A well-timed burst of businessfollowed by a well-earned restcan do wonders for your productivity. Here's how to put one foot in front of the other to...

You're an organism. And organisms run in cycles. Here's how to work with yours.

The notion that the best way to introduce a streaming music service to women is to present it as an emotional dildo is confounding.

This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: the WordPress template hierarchy. It's one of the most important

Studies in humans in Britain, Denmark, Canada and in the United States could find no association between saccharin consumption and bladder cancer once they accounted for cigarette smoking (which does cause it). Based on these newer studies, saccharin was removed from the carcinogen list in 2000. But by that time, opinions were set. It did little to make anyone feel safe.

The truth is, sluts like me are everywhere on Tinder but we aren’t impressed by men who are positively beleaguered by the prospect of having to put effort into getting laid, nor do we like it when they mock the boundaries of our girlfriends who want to use Tinder only for traditional dating.

You’re going to say it doesn’t matter–that Science Fiction and Fantasy needs to focus on the heroes, the extraordinary, the clean and easy revolution that we can get behind with no moral qualms. But see, the thing is…. by focusing on this, we perpetuate a great illusion, a great silence. We forget that empires like this only exist because of the consent of the majority. We forget that inequal systems only work because people are convinced everyone is in their proper place, and are convinced it’s their moral right to oppress others, or that being oppressed is inevitable; or, worse, that the oppressors are morally superior or more meritorious. Because we only talk about heroes, we like to think that, back then, we would be among them. And the truth is–most of us wouldn’t. Actually, most of us aren’t, today.

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Thoughts on what it means to be a maker.

I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed.

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

I know this: I am not my job. I am not my industry or its stereotypes. I am a black woman who happens to work in the tech industry. I don’t need to change to fit within my industry. My industry needs to change to make everyone feel included and accepted.

It has been a long goddamn winter. (At least it has here on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, i.e. the center of the known universe.) If you and your people are anything like me and mine, all your conversations over the past few months have tended towards serious discussions of the end times—which, for the naturally melancholic among us, can be a strange comfort. "Finally," you may have thought, "people get it! I'm not alone!" But now the sun has started to come out, and today you looked around and saw all the people smiling and frolicking, and the birds were singing about how much they want to have sex with each other, and you were like, "Oh, goddammit. Why do I still feel like garbage?"

MetaFilter began in 1999 as a sort of humane proto-Reddit. Why did a site for sharing “best of the web” links become a place where strangers help each other in real life in extraordinary ways?

Spend some time with a depressed, laconic Luigi as he chain smokes and wanders through a crumbling Mushroom Kingdom, ruminating on ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made.

Rihanna won’t let us feel better about ourselves through her story, and she won’t even say sorry.

What do you need to know about code to survive in a suspicious world?

Stephen Colbert is ready to reinvent The Late Show. But how will he do it? And who will he be this time? The new king of late-night gives GQ a sneak peek

The fact that young people aren’t prioritizing marriage doesn’t mean they aren’t carefully considering the question of whether or not to seek a partner and marry them; it only suggests that we have other priorities in the immediate term, particularly since our generation got off to a slow start during the recession.

For the majority of white people, race is something that happens to other people. Whiteness is a default that needs no name — all deviations must be categorized and given a “race.” If race is always something that happens to other people, how are you able to see the part you play in the system? If you haven’t had to sit with your whiteness and figure out what it means in the world, how are you ever supposed to understand the system of racism that you hope to dismantle?

After a group of fans tried to guarantee a whiter, more male slate, most of the big Hugos instead went to "No Winner."

Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.

By Jessamyn West. Build moss terrariums at home. It's easy!

Tech tips for people who are going to die (someday)

As my colleague Brentin Mock points out, to observe that homicides began increasing in St. Louis before the protests is not to make a subjective interpretation, but to offer a knowable and verifiable fact. If the “Ferguson Effect” is real, how can it be that it started before the Ferguson protests? Neglecting this question is neither dispassionate nor high-minded. It is the sort of insidious “false equivalence” that so rightly irks my colleague James Fallows. “False equivalence” runs contrary to the mission to journalism—it obscures where journalists are charged with clarifying. A reasonable person could read the Times’ story and conclude that there is as much proof for the idea that protests against police brutality caused crime to rise, as there is against it. That is the path away from journalism and toward noncommittal stenography: Some people think climate change is real, some do not. Some people believe in UFOs, others doubt their existence. Some think brain cancer can be cured with roots and berries, but others say proof has yet to emerge.