Society

In an absolute barn burner of an essay, Matthew Walther asks hard questions about our obligations to those rendered passive, distracted, and poor by our technological society.

We ought to see localism not as an accomplice to the tribalism that’s everywhere rising, but as an antidote to it.

Women’s “ick” for AI isn’t technophobia or a gap to close. It’s wisdom to act on.

Yesterday, Vox somehow managed to write an entire article about the history of Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison without mentioning the CIA even once.

Owner calls it ‘ludicrous’ Dissent Cafe and Bar was shut down after complaint, the first in Australia’s capital since new federal hate symbol laws

In the past, the word "empathy" was hardly controversial among conservatives. President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) never used "empathy" as an insult. But in recent years, many far-right MAGA Republicans and evangelical Christian nationalists are attacking "empathy" as a major...

A woman used a tool, shared what she made, it might even save her some time, and then some men lost their minds. This is not a new story. In 1925, Dr. Guy Manning stood before a medical conference …

The marginal costsMarginal costs of companies in the digital industry are approaching zero. This clearly distinguishes the business modelsBusiness models of Facebook or Google from the business modelsBusiness models of the old economy. While the marginal...

In today's economy, selling a new zero-marginal cost product is a real challenge, as it is difficult to determine a product's “correct” sales price ba…

Inside the civil war at the anti-woke university backed by Bari Weiss.

It is a curious thing when an artist, thinker, or writer gains influence outside the audience he intends or is comfortable with. When a thinker associated with the right becomes popular on the left, or a novelist associated with the progressive left becomes popular among conservative readers, there can be a sort of strain felt between the audience in fact and the “true” audience, or between those who feel themselves to be the authentic recipients of a work’s message and meaning and those who, to the true believers, come across as opportunistic in their enjoyment of works in tension with their own views. The same is true when a writer working within an academic discipline gets picked up by those outside it: Those working within that discipline may find the co-opting of these thinkers misplaced at best or malicious at worst.

US20200310367A1: A booth having a housing enclosing a viewing station opposite an entertainment station; a robotic entertainer disposed within the entertainment station, the robotic entertainer having a humanoid appearance and comprising a plurality of actuators; and a computing system coupled to the plurality of actuators and configured to control the actuators so to move the robotic ...

Town residents were shocked that Donald Trump’s promised nationwide raids actually affected them.

From The New York Times (gift link): “Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class.” Sigh. And sigh again. See also Natal...

What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again.

I don’t normally say this, but if you watch one thing on kottke.org today, this week, this month, make it this speech written by Shakespeare and performed by

Advances in artificial intelligence are creating a perfect storm for those seeking to spread disinformation at unprecedented speed and scale. And it’s virtually impossible to detect.

Voters who get their news from Twitter are markedly different in our polls than the median voter

Or, how educated, self-aware, and motivated foodies can change the world Scientific Methodology For all of pre-modern human history, with no gas lamps or electricity, after the sun went down, it go…

16,000 people. Wednesday morning. That’s 30,000 in three months when you count October.

The human brain breaks doing Big Math.

The Trump administration has claimed the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building. But new documents make no mention of the gang and reveal federal agents had information about “illegal aliens unlawfully occupying apartments.”

Anthropic has unveiled a legal plugin that helps customise its large language model Claude for legal tasks such as document review.