Sasha knew she was a girl from the age of two or three. “It was not a passing fancy,” her mother Karine tells us in Little Girl, the elegant and moving 2020 documentary by the French director Sébastien Lifshitz. When we first meet Sasha, she’s now seven, in second grade…
The other day tech writer Clive Thompson wrote an excellent piece for this platform entitled “Wearable Computers Should Never Have Cameras.” Thompson’s piece was prompted by news of Facebook’s collab with Ray-Bans — surely an effort to create wearables that finally attain the cool factor. …
Do you know what the official national language of the United States is?
There is none.
That’s right. We have no official national language.
Now some folks have told me in the past, “Well, English is the unofficial national language.”
Right, so that means it’s not the official national language…
My wife’s friend just died from complications with COVID-19.
She was 38.
She had two children.
Her husband was vaccinated.
She was not.
Get vaccinated folks.
Please.
It may mean…
Some part of you dies when you lose your faith. So, no wonder people fear losing it, because, really, who wants to die twice? It’s not a death of the body or mind, of course. Instead, we fear the death of family or friends or community or—really—our ties to these…
“The movement to preserve the habitability of the planet for future generations must directly challenge the tribal power of nationalism and the chronic militarization of public discourse.” — Daniel Deudney, “The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security”
Consider some sobering statistics. First, studies confirm that rises in temperature…
It’s taken a while but I think I’m finally learning not to take the bait. I’m sorry.
It’s nothing most of us haven’t done. I’m really just coming to terms with the impact of what I’m doing. What we’re doing.
I’ll use the example of Twitter, but this applies elsewhere…
I love the sound of cicadas
Their sharp summer shimmer
Ricocheting through the neighborhood
Even here in Brooklyn
Not as impressive as in other parts, perhaps
But nonetheless there
Ancient, cacophonous and electric
A signal cast off unceasingly from their vacillating membranes
Maybe for me it’s nostalgia
As a child…
Quite a mind boggling story recently: The FBI bought a fledgling encryption app called Anom about three years back and monitored criminals eager to use it for organizing various shenanigans, leading to some 800 arrests in 12 countries. The app was marketed exclusively to criminals — often by word of…
In 2020, something happened, which offered a moment of hope for supporters of green energy technologies: For the first time in the United States, electricity generated by wind and solar technology exceeded that of coal. This change lasted only days, a blip really in our history of energy use and…
