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Irish author Fintan O'Toole reviews One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by MeFi's own pre-eminent science fiction author Omar El Akkad for the New York Times.Previously: Kim Stanley Robinson & Omar El Akkad discuss the climate crisis* *When it comes to apocalyptic dysfunctional eco-catastrophes MeFi's own Omar is our full service provider... ;)

January, 1928: It is a bright time for German democracy. After a period of struggle, inflation is finally under control, and the economy is expanding steadily. In foreign policy, we have reached agreements with the Western powers and the Soviet Union that might make genuine peace a reality. Now, the task of Social Democracy is to prepare for the next election. The bourgeois-right government...

A rarely used amendment to the Endangered Species Act allows for the creation of a committee nicknamed "the God Squad" to take unprecedented action during emergencies like hurricanes and wildfires. Trump wants to convene this committee to bypass endangered species protections and other environmental regulations to ramp up timber production across 280 million acres of national forests and other public lands. Likely fallout includes...

Analyzing UK people by their opinions doesn't reconstruct generational cohorts . Preliminary research? Better-than-average marketing research? Common fallacies rediscovered?The Mefi bait might be this: On average, the generations have a Group Cohesion Score of +1.3, making them only marginally more like-minded than the nation as a whole. For Gen Z, this score falls to +0.2. People born between 1997 and 2013 have no stronger...

"Don Ellis led one of the most colorful big bands in the history of jazz from 1966 until 1978. Ellis's big band was distinguished by its unusual instrumentation, the exploration of uneven or odd time signatures, its occasional humor, and its openness to using rock rhythms and electronics. His orchestra achieved enormous popular appeal at a time when the influence of big band music...

Nine is a deceptively simple demo breaking free of the Commodore 64's famous 8 hardware sprite limit. Its creator has made an accessible explanation of the numerous tricks used to make it possible.

Our alleged shooters--it has become clear over the past week--weren't the thuggish murderers and rapists of fevered reactionary imagination, but Rationalists: Members of a large and loose community of autodidact and amateur philosophers and activists focused on self-described rationalist inquiry and self-improvement that's become influential in A.I. research and philanthropy. from The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults by Max ReadSee also: The Delirious,...

Yet as I put stuff into another banker's box for storage, I started kicking myself for not hanging onto more of that material. A short conversation on storage, accumulation, and game packaging.= between Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacney from Remap Radio.

Your Wrong is part of a larger three year research project, Prescriptivism in Popular Culture, which aims to raise awareness of prescriptivism across different popular culture media. The project focuses primarily on French-language contexts, but this website welcomes submissions in any language.

"There was this cohort of groups who at such a formative age, a critical age, their worlds got flipped upside down." (slTheWalrus)Between the 2008 crash for an earlier generation and the pandemic for the current one, things are tough out there, y'all. (Article does mention that demonizing the feckless lazy youth* is nothing new in history.) *obv not feckless nor lazy

The city government of Miami Beach, Florida, USA has a message -- "The entire month of March 2025 has been designated as a high-impact period in Miami Beach, resulting in additional measures with respect to traffic, staffing and public safety." -- and an accompanying 90-second video in the style of a reality TV show. The "Spring Break Reality Check" page tries to "reinforce the...

He found that years of Musk tweets branding Dogecoin as "the people's crypto" and envisioning the token as someday becoming "the standard for the global financial system" actually created a segment of true believers among his followers who, to this day, fully expect Musk to be a cryptocurrency kingmaker who will crown Dogecoin as the default "currency of Earth." (It possibly helps that Musk...

Firefox users are furious about Mozilla's new data sharing fiasco Mozilla Firefox is a very popular alternative Web Browser. Most people love the browser's adaptability, customizability, and its (formerly) definitive statement about how it processes user data. However, the company's latest privacy policy changes have users riled up. You might want to investigate the new TOS.The original linked article has all the details but...

The degree to which we have banished eternity outward, from unexplored landmasses to the outskirts of spacetime, is the extent to which the stakes – of what unfolds here and now – have heightened. If orienting ourselves in space generated the Copernican worldview, gaining our bearings in time is forging something new. The tenor of the former was mediocrity; the lesson of the latter...

Jailed Kurdish militant leader calls for end to conflict with Turkey [ungated] - "Turkey's jailed militant leader Abdullah Ocalan called on his Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) to disarm and disband on Thursday, a move that could end its 40-year conflict with Ankara and have far-reaching political and security consequences for the region."In his message on Thursday, Ocalan said the armed struggle had "run its...

Oakland's Mayoral debate was a doozy. "I love you all so much. I'm going to serve you as your next mayor, but I'm going to go home and take care of myself tonight. I don't have time for the games," Webb said before she walked out of the Castlemont High School auditorium. ... There's Mindy Pechenuk, an unabashed Donald Trump supporter, who said one...

Reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI. Results of a research study suggest that conversing with an AI chatbot can durably reduce conspiratorial beliefs. "The treatment reduced participants' belief in their chosen conspiracy theory by 20% on average. This effect persisted undiminished for at least 2 months; was consistently observed across a wide range of conspiracy theories, from classic conspiracies involving the assassination of...

A decade after the dress, we've learned a lot about how people could see a simple image so differently from one another. The dress is of particular interest to me as a researcher who studies differences in perception and cognition between individuals. While the colors of a piece of clothing might be a trivial thing to disagree about, we can all learn a thing...

What Harm Reduction Really Looks Like (On harm reduction in Minneapolis, Tim Evans for The Nation (supported by the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, archive.ph)

It comes at a time when we're facing a country-wide backlash to harm reduction measures like safe consumption sites, safe supply drugs, and decriminalization. With Trudeau, who has overseen many of those policy shifts, about to leave government, it feels like the end of a relatively progressive era for drug policy in Canada.Yes, this link is from Substack. Yes, I am aware of why...

Variety: "Michelle Trachtenberg, 'Gossip Girl' and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Actor, Dies at 39." More obituaries: The Hollywood Reporter; CNN; and NYT (ungated). Entries at IMDb, Letterboxd, and Wikipedia. Trachtenberg's work readily available online includes Human Kind Of, "an animated comedy about a nerdy teenager who finds out her estranged father was an alien," released on Facebook Watch and underappreciated in a crowded field...