Society

As the climate warms, more health risks will come not only from other people, but increasingly from the environment around us.

Postcards were first printed in the mid-1800s, and over the next century, hundreds of billions of them would be sent around the world. Between June 1907 and June 1908 alone, Americans exchanged 667 million of them. As author Lydia Pyne argues, the astonishing ubiquity of postcards made them the “world’s first social network.” Practical and […]

Classifiers considered harmful.

The dramatic uptick in remote workers should be a chance to embrace change—not fight it.

A rebuttal of sorts to the unreasonable anger over BNL's biggest hit, as portrayed in a popular column by a prominent critic.

I am willing to bet that 200 years from now (2222) more than 66% of people born on the planet will have adult names they chose themselves. Having a name chosen by your parents will be like having a marriage … Continue reading →

“Please be kind” sounds like a moral imperative. And in some ways, it is. But behind the theory of the firm and a key building block of successful communities is the idea that kind inte…

If you are unmoved by the promises of our electeds, head over to the Federal Building this evening at 5 pm.

It's not a real study

The country’s hackers have gotten far more aggressive since 2015, when the Ministry of State Security largely took over the country’s cyberespionage.

The complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books.

Make a list of the richest people on earth. Behind their wealth are large organizations comprised of hundred of thousands of people who make stuff that millions of others want to use in their lives. Hundreds of thousands of Amazon

Fourteen years ago, Kevin Kelly famously proposed that an artist could make a living online with a thousand true fans. Has time proved him correct?

Two stories hit the doom scrolls at roughly the same time this month. First, Bloomberg Media asked if the era of remote work is coming to an

I’m a fan of appropriate placebos. They often have few side effects, they’re inexpensive and they work when used in the right situations. You can check out my rant on them here, it&#821…

Neither you nor I have consented to the genes we inherited. Our general makeup was dictated to us by our ancestors. I had no say in my allergies, my short stature, my baldness, my tone deafness, nor in my even

By every geologic measure, modern human life is a tiny blip, a spark of static on a very long-playing record. For most of the time that life has existed on Earth, there were no humans. And when the…

The reality of AI is something harder to comprehend.

A tidal wave of chronic illness could leave millions of people incrementally worse off.

Political philosopher Chris Freiman makes the case.

Chinese chops are used to sign many types of legal documents. They have been in use for thousands of years and are an important part of Chinese culture.

Here on Techdirt, we’ve written about a bunch of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight shows that are quite frequently directly in agreement with what we write about on Techdirt. We’re …