Society

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

“The victims of History are permanently exiled from home, within and without. The practitioners or memory are also: we live as foreigners, as translators.”

Say Nothing and a history of hunger strikes

With fasting at an all-time high in popularity, here is an enlightening exploration into the history, science, and philosophy behind the practice—e...

A lack of coverage

There’s quite a few rights you give up by purchasing a digital copy of your favorite game, movie, or album! On Digital Rights Bytes we outline the differences between owning physical and digital

Outside his family., friends, and close colleagues, not many tears are being shed over the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson.

The hero worship of the family of American royalty has a dark side: a tendency toward conspiracism that fits with the MAGA movement.

Undocumented orphaned wells pose hazards to both the environment and the climate. Scientists are building modern tools to help locate, assess, and pave the way for ultimately plugging these forgotten relics.

Hannah Byrne joined Facebook to combat far-right extremism. She’s now convinced the tech giant can’t be trusted with such power.

A CSRDA Discussion Paper (Long-term Consequences of Early Career Disadvantages on Fertility: Evidence from Japan by Manting Chen) finds that men in Japan who start their careers in non-standard employment, such as temporary or contract work, face a major disadvantage when it comes to getting married and having children later in life compared to those who land stable jobs right out of school.

Creating a better digital version

The Phoebus cartel engineered a shorter-lived lightbulb and gave birth to planned obsolescence

This year I took a sabbatical, recorded a podcast with Freakonomics, designed and shipped a tiny modular synthesiser, and learned many learnings. Tom Whitwell designs open source music electronics as…

The new law guarantees fundamental rights for sex workers, including the ability to refuse clients, set the conditions of an act, and stop an act at any moment.

I’ve been focused on cultural drift for about nine months now, and the probability estimates in my last post make this a good time to take stock.

Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi

That’s what Charlie Schweik and friends will be talking about in the next salon in the Beyond the Web series at Indiana University, hosted by the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School…

The semiconductor chips coming out of a nondescript fabricator in Youngwood used to be so sensitive that soldiers would rather destroy the computer system...

I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless.

With revenue down for the second year in a row, Sonos needs to balance its books. Could a move that’s become familiar in the hardware industry help?

An expression of the value in the striving

I really like today's essay and I think you will too! Corey Atad writes about the 1995 David Fincher film Se7en, the fraught decision to have children or not in times like these, and whether the world is still worth fighting for. "It’s said that Fincher wanted the film

Because irony is dead, a Dutch tulip farmer is heating their greenhouse with Bitcoin mining: The servers in turn are powered by solar energy from the roof, reducing the normally huge electricity costs for mining, and cutting its potential impact on the environment. Because the most efficient way to run a solar powered greenhouse is to use GPUs as electric heaters. Seems legit. By reducing ...

Uber & Lyft Earnings Under Pressure from Waymo, Robotaxis. (Business Insider) Waymo’s robotaxis are undercutting Uber and Lyft prices in Phoenix while matching quality. It’s no long…

Border agents are mostly trying to catch people coming north, not guns going south. This is NAFTA, flipped. The idea of...

In 2024, the almighty queue became a signifier of cool in and of itself – a palatable, scene-y symbol of consumerism, whether you're queuing for pints, burgers or clothes. Nowhere is that more apparent than at fashion sample sales. Get in line…