Category: Bookmark
March 31, 2018
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Perry Chen Says He Wants To Revitalize Kickstarter. Employees Say He’s Doing the Opposite.
Joel Barhamand for BuzzFeed News
Since founder Perry Chen took back the reins at Kickstarter, the company has landed in a period of turmoil set in motion by the person most equipped to steer it in a new direction: Chen himself.
Founders of successful startups hold something akin to mythical status… -
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LEGO’s new TIE Fighter for Solo: A Star Wars Story shows how sophisticated the toys have become
In 1999, Danish toy company Lego made a huge announcement: it had signed a license with Lucasfilm Ltd. to produce a series of toys based on the Star Wars films, the first time in the company’s history that it made such a deal. The move wasn’t without major qualms within the company; for decades, it…
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Why Have We Soured on the ‘Devil’s Advocate’?
In 1990, a lawyer named Mike Godwin made what would become a famous observation: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability that someone will draw a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches 100 percent. The internet has changed pretty significantly since then; its fascists, for…
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Wikimedia Foundation receives $3 million grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to make freely licensed images accessible and reusable across the web – Wikimedia Blog
Photo by Ajepbah, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE . The Wikimedia Foundation, with a US$3,015,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation , is leading an effort to enable structured data on Wikimedia Commons, the world’s largest repository of freely licensed educational media. The project will support…
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“2001: A Space Odyssey”: What It Means, and How It Was Made
The power of Stanley Kubrick’s classic is bound up with the story of its making. Photograph from Photofest Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick’s confounding sci-fi masterpiece, “ 2001: A Space…
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Machine Learning’s ‘Amazing’ Ability to Predict Chaos | Quanta Magazine
Half a century ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a…
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Selling Politics Like a Lifestyle Brand
There’s a small stack of Planned Parenthood T-shirts in Rebecca Davis’s closet, each one acquired at a volunteer event with the organization. Davis is a longtime supporter of Planned Parenthood and even became a member of its activist council last year, but those shirts are gathering dust. “It’s not…
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Rebecca Solnit: The Myth of “Real” America Just Won’t Go Away
Watching the film Phantom Thread , I kept wondering why I was supposed to be interested in a control freak who is consistently unpleasant to all the people around him. I kept looking at the other characters—his sister who manages his couture business, his seamstresses, eventually the furniture (as a…
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Beyoncé’s Triumphant Homecoming at Coachella
Beyoncé’s Coachella performance, her most comprehensive retrospective to date, underscored not only her Southernness but the global black vernacular that continues to shape her. Photograph by Andrew White / Parkwood Entertainment On Saturday, around 9 p.m. , Pacific Time, I logged on to the…
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Review: Beyoncé Is Bigger Than Coachella
INDIO, Calif. — Let’s just cut to the chase: There’s not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician this year, or any year soon, than Beyoncé’s headlining set at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on Saturday night.
It was rich with… -
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Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?
A look at the available evidence
It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.
Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an… -
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The Cult Brand Whisperer Behind Casper, Allbirds, And Birchbox
In 2013, the patent for finasteride, the active ingredient in male-pattern-baldness medication Propecia, expired. This might seem an unlikely development to send ripples across the nimble, young world of startups, but within a couple of years, a handful of entrepreneurs were zeroing in on hair loss…
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The future of mobility will be multi-modal, shared and zero emission.
This interview is published in The Beam #5 — Subscribe now for more on the topic
Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur who became famous for co-founding Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world. The successful entrepreneur wasn’t about to stop there, going on to co-found Buzzcar, a… -
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Opinion | Sometimes a Broken Glass Is Just a Broken Glass
It is tempting to think that a work of great art appears in the material world complete and perfectly formed, like a rainbow or an egg, that every note or phrase or scene or brush stroke has been placed just so and for good reason. It is tempting to think that geniuses know what they are doing.
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It’s official! Wordnik is now a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit! | Wordnik
You may remember when we first announced we had started the process of becoming a not-for-profit corporation, with the mission of collecting and sharing data for every word in the English language. Our mission remains the same, but now our status is official.
Wordnik is now a 501(c)(3) organization,… -
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The Rise in Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers – MEL Magazine
In the year 2000, a time traveler reportedly walked among us. He was from the year 2038, but he drove a 1967 Chevy Corvette. His sweet time ride disrupted gravity using a twin singularity system. This time traveler arrived in present day to stop a civil war in the U.S. He did so by contacting the…
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Opinion | A Smorgasbord of Solutions for Global Warming
Opinion Thinking about Earth Day, I did a Google search for “global warming solutions.” Up popped a slew of “what you can do” lists from leading scientific and environmental organizations. When I dug in, however, I found the suggestions rather general — “reduce emissions,” “stop deforestation,”…
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The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite get modern American misogyny
Hulu The Handmaid’s Tale is a difficult show to appreciate right now. After following the plot of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book in its first season, its second season piles on a series of additional horrors, all set in the future nation of Gilead — a religious theocracy that kills and tortures women…
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The Passionate Photo Colorizers Who Are Humanizing the Past
Banana docks, New York, ca. 1890-1910. Marina Amaral Last week, a striking image circulated online: a grainy triptych of registration photos of a 14-year-old Auschwitz prisoner named Czesława Kwoka. Auschwitz’s prisoner photos were all shot in black-and-white, but this one is rendered in soft color…
March 30, 2018
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Canonize: Creating a Personal Canon Template – Brendan Schlagel
I love the idea of the “personal canon”: an encapsulation, in list form, of those things that have most shaped you. A sort of annotated bibliography of influences. Over the past few years I’ve come across several excellent examples of people using a corner of their personal websites to provide such…
March 27, 2018
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Optimization over Explanation – Berkman Klein Center Collection – Medium
Maximizing the benefits of machine learning without sacrificing its intelligence Note: Wired.com has simultaneously run an op-ed version of this paper. Imagine your Aunt Ida is in an autonomous vehicle (AV) — a self-driving car — on a city street closed to human-driven vehicles. Imagine a swarm of…
March 24, 2018
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The One Thing Every Entrepreneur Needs to Start Planning for Now (Hint: It’s Not Retirement)
There’s no escaping entrepreneurship, at least not for long; you may get to the point where you no longer need the money, but you’ll never get to the point where you no longer need the passion. Yes, you may have enough money to head off and live the rest of your life on a tropical island watching…
March 21, 2018
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It’s Time To Say It, Retirement Is Dead, This Is What Will Take its Place.
"We get old when the weight of our memories and regrets starts to exceed that of our dreams." When it to comes to the topic of retirement the old rules no longer apply. In 1935 when the Social Security act was passed the age of retirement was set at 65. At the time the average life expectancy was…
March 18, 2018
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Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous
On the days when Bitcoin crashes, a holiday atmosphere takes over in my corners of the internet. People tweet screengrabs of Reddit fights. It’s always good fun to watch strangers grieve as their digital nonsense nickels melt into slag. It’s not that I want Bitcoin holders to suffer, really. As a…
March 15, 2018
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The Male Glance | VQR Online
Illustration by Ina Jang In the spring of 2013, HBO conducted a sly experiment on the “elite” TV-viewing public. It aired two new shows—both buddy dramas—back to back. Each was conceived as a short self-contained season, limited by design to a small number of episodes. Each had a single talented and…
March 12, 2018
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How Annihilation Nails the Complex Reality of Depression
The women of Annihilation. Photo: Peter Mountain/Paramount Pictures Let’s talk about what it means to destroy yourself. In the relatively short time I’ve been alive, I have made an art out of self-destruction. I’ve placed myself in frightening situations just to feel something, anything but the…
March 9, 2018
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Big Data versus Humanity | Brewster Kahle’s Blog
I never used the tools of Big Data and artificial intelligence to build profiles of masses of people. And on purpose. I realized what could be done– the power in knowing too much, the temptation to manipulate. But now others have crossed that line. Total Information Awareness; Facebook, Equifax .…
March 6, 2018
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Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20
In 2013, Jason Kottke wrote a prediction for Nieman Lab’s year-end roundup: “ The blog is dead, long live the blog. ” Kottke was then (and still is) owner of one of the longest continuously running blogs on the web: kottke.org , founded in 1998. “Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In…
March 3, 2018
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Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’
From "Here." Illustration by Richard McGuire You are looking at a corner of your living room, a scene that remains stable, boringly or reassuringly so, day after day, year after year. And yet that corner serves as a frame for many human activities over those days and years. It accrues joys and…
February 28, 2018
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Your Family: Past, Present, and Future – Wait But Why
I have one living grandparent—my father’s mother, who’s 89. Nana. I visited Nana recently and went through the usual activities—talking about myself in a loud voice, fixing her “broken machine” by unminimizing the internet browser window, being told to slow down Timothy and get in the left lane,…