A good proportion of science fiction can be summed up like this: scientists invent a black box that does a magical thing. Hooray! Oh no… wait… that magical thing has some kinks. Oh dear, oh my, look what has happened, it turns out that there are some downsides to the magical box. The thing is, […]
Rose
I am writing this post while walking around in Prospect Park. I shouldn’t really call it writing, because I’m actually speaking. I am walking in the park with a bluetooth headset on, and saying these words into the microphone, and hoping that my phone understands them. So far, so good. It is a cold day. […]
Recently I was looking for a distraction-free writing system. I knew I had heard about many. But they all seemed to have simple, hard to remember names. (A related complaint: companies that name themselves words like “medium” so that when you’re trying to figure out how to do something you cannot search “medium format image” […]
Last week, I saw a lot of shocked men. They were shocked about the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment allegations. They were shocked that fellow liberal men in journalism were colluding with Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos to trash women. They were shocked that there was yet another case of sexual harassment and abuse in science. You know […]
A few years ago, I was doxxed by angry people on the internet. (I’m not going to rehash what happened. You’re reading this on a machine that has google.) After that, I started getting asked to do talks. How can we fix online harassment? How can individuals protect themselves? How can newsrooms better prepare themselves, […]
My grandparents live on a farm in central California, in a small ranch house surrounded by rolling hills. The house is shaped like an L, with a long hallway stretching one way, and a short stubby kitchen and living room not-quite-stretching the other way. In the long hallway there are paintings and photographs on the […]
“Wisconsin Company Offers To Implant Chips In Its Employees.” This was the first headline I saw about 32M’s employee RFID program, and it’s relatively chill, as headlines go. But I already knew that I’d be getting emails soon. You see, I make a podcast about the future that often talks about body modification. And also, reader, […]
I grew up listening to a lot of talk radio, thanks to a childhood spent in the car driving from this soccer tournament in rural Connecticut to that one in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, all while listening to Mike and the Mad Dog, or Dr. Laura, or Opie and Anthony. I didn’t think it […]