culture

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.

Her discovery may have been crucial to creating the atomic bomb, but she wanted nothing to do with it nor wanted to be depicted in films about it. And I believe Meitner’s refusal to participate in the weaponization of her work on moral grounds makes her more worthy of commemoration than Oppenheimer. She chose humanity over notoriety.

To me, the significance of the theory is its introduction of a coherent frame by which we can better understand root causes for the complex array of global catastrophic risks and the prevailing crises that humanity currently faces. Critically, the Metacrisis theory also calls to our attention a staggering hidden premonition: our civilization... See more

We can always opt out of this arrangement, of course, and live happily in meatspace, but that is precisely the point: Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.

A reading revolution is taking place on this notorious message board, most famous for alt-right memes, anything-goes chatter, and large-scale coordinated pranks (several hoax bomb threats organised by the site have led to arrests and mass evacuations). Users operate under total anonymity and are subject to bare-bones moderation. Most of the... See more

But this Google trial? By far the most important moment was when Judge Mehta denied a third-party motion to broadcast a publicly accessible audio feed of the trial for fear that information Google wishes wouldn’t be disclosed become public. Indeed, Google lawyers have explicitly argued that the judge should avoid allowing documents to become public... See more