A Night in Union Square After Roe

We built ourselves a digital panopticon. Now it may haunt our most personal healthcare decisions. — Roe v. Wade is gone. Almost 50 years in effect and it’s gone. Just like that. Of course, it wasn’t really an instantaneous development: A voting mass of highly-politicized anti-abortion Americans had been working on reversing Roe for decades. We’ve all—most of us—been working on something else for decades, too…

It’s not a mistake for AIs and algorithms to approach categorization issues with care, particularly where gender is concerned — The alt text for this image is absolutely, 100% factually correct. That is a person in a suit and tie. If this alt text is a system-generated snippet of alt-text, then the system got it right. No mistakes were made. Nothing is broken. That’s not what one critic of the…

“The metaverse” already sounds dated. Because we’re already living in it. — Here’s a prediction: The term “metaverse” will sound silly and old-fashioned before too long. Like “cyberspace” or “the information superhighway” or “surfing the web.” Why? …

A growing source of evidence-based information about transgender people, providing links to specific studies and other helpful resources — Currently, many individuals and organizations have launched an all-out attack on transgender people, likely in an attempt, not just to stigmatize trans people as they’re finally gaining acceptance, but also to stimulate support for those critics’ broader political agendas.

How a Twitter bot handles trolls in defense of the transgender community — Sealioning now seems to be the preferred tactic of anti-transgender critics and trolls on social media as it allows them to pretend they’re being polite, if insistent and to proclaim that science is on their side without actually taking a deeper look at the emerging science on the topic. Compared…

No, we don’t have so many school shootings because we took God out of schools — “Where there is no vision, the people perish” — Proverbs 29:18 It’s a pretty common refrain we hear from politicians, pundits and voters on the right after every school shooting in the United States. Something to the effect of “This all started when we banned prayer in schools” or “Back…

Abbott keeps finding new ways to police Texan bodies by outsourcing the job to Texan citizens — In Texas, a state very concerned with resisting tyranny, you’re free, so free that, you’re not only unencumbered by mask and vaccine mandates, but you’re also free — empowered and incentivized even — to police the bodies of pregnant people and youths who you suspect may be transgender. Governor Greg…

Photoessay: NYC’s Stand With Ukraine Rally in Times Square — Note: Click on any image to view a larger version At around 1pm on Saturday March 5th, a sea of supporters pooled into Times Square in support of Ukraine, a few days after Vladimir Putin ordered Russian forces to invade that country. …