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What if the government simply paid everyone enough so that no one was poor? It's an insane idea that's gaining an unlikely alliance of supporters.

Kept books as of end-of-2015. Most are pretty good.

Inspiration for Kyle Van Horn’s cameramail, which inspired me. Between 1990 and 1996, over 200 pieces were sent to/from P22. From altered junk mail to minimally cryptic addressing, Each piece has some purpose to both test the post office and also keep an artistic discourse going between its collaborators. The postal service almost always came through. Recently, because of the desire to completely automate, even the slightest variations from standard Postal Rules gets the piece either returned or lost forever. This page is a testament to the golden age of P22 postal art. Mail Art has no commercial value. To our knowledge, none of our mail art has ever sold.

Leaders of the tech industry need to make it clear that they support a medium that loves speech and supports dissent, but does not tolerate hate.

This is tautological, unless you have a definition of “success” other than “be worth a lot of money”. Which raises the question of whether that should be the measure of success. A great many creators are scraping by on merch sales and now Patreon, devoting themselves to making the things they love full-time. If they do it consistently and garner an audience who loves their work, is that not success? You might even call them small businesses… and yet, they don’t have stock worth a lot of money. But the investment model doesn’t leave any room for that kind of success, because the primary thing investors want is to get richer. You provide an incredibly useful service that everyone uses and loves? Great. How much money does it make? How much money do I make? Did you try putting ads on it?

Consider writing THAT essay. What is wrong, Mr. Graham, with REDUCING income inequality by taxing EXCESS wealth, and spending it on public services to maintain or even (gasp) improve social mobility? Because that’s what those “hunters” are really talking about.

There’s an old saw about the web that says that when the web democratized publishing, everyone should have become a writer, but instead most of us became consumers. (Nevermind that email and SMS have most people writing more in a day than their Victorian ancestors wrote in their entire lives.) There’s more than a hint of disparagement and elitism in that saying: everyone should have taken up writing, which is obviously superior to reading or watching or (gasp!) consuming. And I worry that that same sentiment creeps in when we argue the supremacy of text over image on the web. Writing is an important and valuable skill, but so are many other things. Here’s another way to think about it: over the past year, video after video has emerged showing cops shooting unarmed black people. Those videos have been shared on the web, and while they haven’t yet led to anything resembling justice for the victims, they have contributed to profound discussions around race, militarized police forces, guns, and more. They are not sufficient to bring about desperately needed social change—and there’s an argument to be made about whether they are at risk of becoming mere spectacle—but I think it would be hard to deny that they are an important element in the movement, that they have had a major impact. … I worry that the push to keep the web defined to words, while pragmatic and reasonable in many ways, may also be used to decide what stories get told, and what stories are heard. Many more people are using their tiny computers to record video and audio and take pictures than are writing; as much as I may love writing, and as much as I know that transmitting writing via cables and air is a hell of a lot easier and cheaper than transmitting video, I’m not sure I can really stand here and say that the writing is—or should be—primary. One of the design principles of the web is to pave the cowpaths: it looks to me like there are some new paths opening up, ones we may not have expected, ones that aren’t going to make many of our jobs easier. Maybe instead of putting up signs saying there are better paths elsewhere, it’s time we see where these ones take us.

The term "cli-fi" describes stories that grapple with climate, but fiction for the Anthropocene age can help us understand problems far beyond climate and envision new possibilities for the future.

A portable animation and sound kit. With the touch of a finger create melodies charged with moving shapes.

“One day, Phil was playing the drums and I had the reverse talkback on because he was speaking, and then he started playing the drums. The most unbelievable sound came out because of the heavy compressor. I said, ‘My God, this is the most amazing sound! Steve, listen to this.’”

Yule Log 2.015 is a collection of short films created by various artists that are bringing the yule log tradition into the digital age. Warm up your next holiday party and play the films on loop, or pick ‘n choose your faves and enjoy them at your leisure.

in all other arenas, Undertale insists that conflict arises from unwarranted fear and misunderstanding. it rewards you for pacifism and forging friendships. everyone, it wants to suggest, can get along only if we’re determined enough. and yet, the no-mercy run offers the exact obverse suggestion: radical evil exists, and it cannot be expunged. if we take Undertale at its word, however, and believe its conceit of multiple timelines manipulable by the game’s save and load functions, we find that the latter possibility is necessarily latent in the former. that is to say, chara happened; they are constant through all possible narratives, and they are still there, somewhere. the game’s sentimentality runs aground on the lack of mercy it allows the player to exercise, and the subsequent lack of mercy it extends to that player.

Kilduff-Taylor’s tired handwashing here is not so much an indictment of the problem of two interpretive communities — whose existence and cross-reference is facilitated by the internet as a mode of critical reception — as it is an attempt to escape the problem entirely. At some undesignated time before now, people just would have read the game correctly, no problem! Meaning would have been obvious, and interpretation would have been a pleasant exercise in riffing upon its verities from that point on. We’ve thus already lost, and all we can do is take solace in our own knowledge and interpretation as things fall apart. This is disingenuous because the fact that anyone is even taking issue with the implication that Wreden should not be paid for his work is a sign that, indeed, people are not willing to let the patently worse interpretation of the game stand.

And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents. … The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate. … An evidence-based mindset on the state of the world would bring many benefits. It would calibrate our national and international responses to the magnitude of the dangers that face us. It would limit the influence of terrorists, school shooters, decapitation cinematographers, and other violence impresarios. It might even dispel foreboding and embody, again, the hope of the world.

Fearfulness obscures the distinction between real threat on one hand and on the other the terrors that beset those who see threat everywhere. … A “civilian” Kalashnikov can easily be modified into a weapon that would blast a deer to smithereens. That’s illegal, of course, and unsportsmanlike. I have heard the asymmetry rationalized thus: deer can’t shoot back. Neither can adolescents in a movie theater, of course. … As for America, we have a way of plunging into wars we weary of and abandon after a few years and a few thousand casualties, having forgotten what our object was; these wars demonstrate an overwhelming power to destroy without any comparable regard to life and liberty, to the responsibilities of power, that would be consistent with maintaining our good name. We throw away our status in the world at the urging of those who think it has nothing to do with our laws and institutions, impressed by the zeal of those supernumeraries who are convinced that it all comes down to shock and awe and boots on the ground. This notion of glory explains, I suppose, some part of the fantasizing, the make-believe wars against make-believe enemies, and a great many of the very real Kalashnikovs.

By the second week I feel catatonic. There is no institutional support for a holdout, even though a trial that does not reach consensus is an inevitable outcome of the jury system. Being in the minority is excruciating. I question whether I have the stomach for it.

The tortoise dies. The tortoise dies because you were too busy blaming him for his situation instead of helping him.

As prolific and internet-known as Meechie and his crew are, they are multiple steps removed from owning, in a tangible sense, their art, leaving them vulnerable to both YouTube’s whims and to having their creativity lifted by outsiders. Atlanta, where Meechie is from, is legendary as a place where teens generate culture, and then go uncompensated as their style and tastes are usurped by a corporate machine hungry for Black Cool. Cultural sharing is ancient. That the speed and relative borderlessness of the internet makes cross-platform, global dissemination seem like a consequence of tech is a convenient amnesia. The propensity to share predates the young black creators doing so online. But they ought to claim lineage. Remember, for instance, the blues. … Part of the reason the originators of viral content are stripped from their labor is because they don’t technically own their production. Twitter does, Vine does, Snapchat does, and the list goes on. Intangible things like slang and styles of dance are not considered valuable, except when they’re produced by large entities willing and able to invest in trademarking them.

On a warm November morning last month, I was in the grandstands for the Japanese Eastern Command’s Parade of the Eastern Army. As the seats around me slowly filled before the performance, I noticed a pair of young men in puffy down jackets on the tarmac below. Peering more closely, I could make out the action figure of a female heroine from an anime series between them. One of the young men took a photograph of the toy and, apparently satisfied with his framing of the mini-skirted cartoon girl against the backdrop of military vehicles, returned the figure to his companion’s satchel and then mounted the stands.

An interview with Drew Fairweather about The Worst Things for Sale.’ Q: Does a tiny part of you think it's sort of wonderful that these horrible things exist, and that someone out there presumably owns them? A: Absolutely not. The issue I'm trying to get at with this body of writing is that our happiness has been pulled from us bit by bit, by industry, by labor, by law, and is being sold back to us at a profit. I have empathy for the seven billion people in the world that try to quiet their own sadness by purchasing products. The products themselves are a global self-perpetuating emotional and economic problem.

Steve Albini and his wife and friends dedicate their Christmas to directly helping poor people.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing Our Enemies From Being a Burden on the Rest of the Country.

It isn’t an issue of race because there is anything inherently flawed with racialized people but because there is something inherently flawed with white supremacy. That’s what affirmative action was about and what it continues to be about. Can you design an integrated social, economic, cultural, and institutional system of privilege that delimits access to colleges and universities as a normal course of business and be not-for-profit, state-supported, and culturally legitimate? Because that’s what U.S. higher education did and what it continues to do. Whether black or hispanic students do not like the culture, drop out, transfer, get an F in freshman comp is not the issue. The issue is not individual performance but institutional exclusion. Of course, these universities could agree that the mismatch is just too great to bear.

Allows you to merge terms, set term parents in bulk, and swap term taxonomies.

People are entitled to their taste and you can’t help who you fall in love with, right? Totally right! Except for this one, teensy, tiny exception: Race. Oh I’m sorry, did I say teensy tiny? I meant monumental and indicative of an entrenched and deeply troubling societal prejudice that we have been unable to overcome throughout the course of human history. … We are not the passive victims of our own internalized biases. We have governance over our actions. As author and psychologist James Giles writes, “That is not to say that romantic attraction is fully under our control, but only that it is not fully beyond our control.” So when are our love lives going to start reflecting that? Studies have shown that we are attracted to what we know and are used to, but as Deborah Ward writes, “Repeated exposure to certain people will increase our attraction toward them.” This means that a conscious change in behavior will impact subconscious desires.

The article that started the band. By "fingerprinting" DNA of the ant species - Mycocepurus smithii - they found them all to be clones of the colony's queen.

Many Silicon Valley firms are scrambling to hire executives to focus on diversity — there’s an opening at Airbnb right now for a ‘‘Head of Diversity and Belonging.’’ But at the biggest firms, women and minorities still make up an appallingly tiny percentage of the skilled work force. And the few exceptions to this rule are consistently held up as evidence of more widespread change — as if a few individuals could by themselves constitute diversity. … Why is there such a disparity between the progress that people in power claim they want to enact and what they actually end up doing about it? Part of the problem is that it doesn’t seem that anyone has settled on what diversity actually means. Is it a variety of types of people on the stages of awards shows and in the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies? Is it raw numbers? Is it who is in a position of power to hire and fire and shape external and internal cultures? Is it who isn’t in power, but might be someday? … Over the past few years, numerous editors have reached out to me asking for help in finding writers and editors of color, as if I had special access to the hundreds of talented people writing and thinking on- and offline. I know they mean well, but I am often appalled by the ease with which they shunt the work of cultivating a bigger variety of voices onto others, and I get the sense that for them, diversity is an end — a box to check off — rather than a starting point from which a more inte­grated, textured world is brought into being. I’m not the only one to sense that there’s a feeling of obligation, rather than excitement, behind the idea. DuVernay herself hinted at this when she, too, admitted that she hates the word. ‘‘It feels like medicine,’’ she said in her speech. ‘‘ ‘Diversity’ is like, ‘Ugh, I have to do diversity.’ I recognize and celebrate what it is, but that word, to me, is a disconnect. There’s an emotional disconnect. ‘Inclusion’ feels closer; ‘belonging’ is even closer.’’

For years, saying you liked Enya was enough to get you laughed out of town. Recently, though, her implicit presence has been everywhere (whether intentional or not). A recent example would be Julia Holter's 'Horns Surrounding Me', a kissing cousin to Watermark's 'Cursum Perfico'. Or how about early Laurel Halo, Julianna Barwick, Grouper; even new Burial track 'Rival Dealer' has an Enya passage, as if his night bus had got lost up a country lane. She's surely ripe for a reappraisal.

The book is an adventure tale whose reward is always bats.

For any discoveries that Murphy makes, the road ahead is paved with obstacles. Safety testing, animal testing, and then finally, the hope that a drug company and its investors can be persuaded to gamble hundreds of millions on the chemical passing the multiple stages of human clinical trials, before it can be turned into an over-the-counter product. The odds seem slim, but with the annual global mortality rate from antibiotic resistance predicted to hit 10 million in the next 35 years, scientists remain hopeful that the politicians will come to better agreements on how to finance antibiotic development. The question is, will they get around to doing so before it’s too late?