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. …

And why are titles and honorifics even required on a form in 2022 anyway? — I just read a story about a couple who found themselves having to wrangle with a bank over a lack of inclusive titles in a mortgage application and I’m struggling to understand why a title field is ever required on a form in 2022. An English couple applied for a…

In a new documentary, a young girl and her family fight for her right to live as her authentic self. — 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…

Will slicker new wearables enable helpful technology or just fuel a privacy nightmare? — 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…

Turning from the certainty of faith to the virtue of doubt — 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…

We must resist using climate change to justify securitizing human migration — “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…

The Simone Biles incident highlights the dark design pattern which surfaces toxic takes to encourage conflict and engagement on the Internet — 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…