Latest Posts

  • Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche

    Wow. Cyber capitalism fetishized to the point of apotheosis. It’s only my first day, but it’s clear this is not the Burning Man-style celebration of the liberatory potential of decentralization I was promised. This is a locked-room, hard-sell pitch session… Continue reading

    Four Days Trapped at Sea With Crypto’s Nouveau Riche

  • American Geographic Polarization

    Research shows that partisans aren’t purposefully walling themselves off. There is no intentional Big Sort. Such geographic polarization—where supporters of one or the other party cluster together in homogeneous enclaves, producing localities with lopsided distributions of political preferences—has been growing… Continue reading

  • ‘Do Not Track’ Privacy Tool Doesn’t Do Anything

    When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them… Continue reading

  • Unwashed Dishes Reveal the Diets of a Lost Civilization

    The potsherds yielded proteins from numerous plants—barley, wheat, peas and bitter vetch—as well as the blood and milk of several species of animal, including cows, sheep and goats. Of even greater interest to the researchers was the precision with which… Continue reading

  • Yet again, the right-wing appropriation of Nietzsche

     “The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole.” –F. Nietzsche Nice overview of how Nietzsche gets misappropriated by urfascists and… Continue reading

  • Surprising Reason the Right Doesn’t Trust the News – POLITICO

    The top editor at the New York Times, A.M. Rosenthal, hit Agnewesque notes in a 1969 internal memo from which Pressman quotes:   I get the impression, reading the Times, that the image we give of America is largely of… Continue reading

  • Nuclear Pasta: Strongest Material in Universe Discovered in Neutron Star Crust

    The strongest material in the universe has been discovered: nuclear pasta from neutron stars. The material is so intense it could never exist on Earth—if somehow a tiny amount were transported here, it would explode like a nuclear bomb. Instead… Continue reading

  • We need to understand that disaster is slow

    Defining a disaster as an “event” has a history extending to the 1960s, when federal funds were spent to model the social impact of a nuclear attack. To do this, Civil Defense officials commissioned studies of proxies of an attack,… Continue reading

  • This Changes Everything | Vanity Fair

    Hollywood’s most powerful women appear in the Geena Davis-produced documentary This Changes Everything, which draws a direct line between the president and the industry’s sea change. — Read on www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/09/this-changes-everything-toronto-film-festival-documentary-weinstein-trump-me-too “Hours after This Changes Everything concluded to a standing ovation,… Continue reading

  • Toxic masculinity endures on

    Serving up bloody violence as a $10 pay-per-view on YouTube and charging as much as $200 for floor seats in the arena, this was an affirmation of the enduring bankability of toxic masculinity. In executing their contrived feud, the two… Continue reading