This week, Mitt Romney noticed a non-white person at the RNC winter meeting in Southern California.
- Old Print Articles: New Jersey farm raises wild animals for circuses (1900) + First woman to be electrocuted stands trial in New York (1927).
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Sales is not my strong suit + It will be like How to Train Your Dragon with more assholes.
- Leon Wieseltier takes on Silicon Valley disruption.
- Taylor Negron was a self-aware and funny character actor.
- Posterity will probably be a kind judge of the Obama Administration.
- The Orrb is like Masturbation 2.0.
- Even by the modest moral standards of the music biz, Kim Fowley was yuck.
- The astronaut-selector for Mars One is interviewed.
- Freeman Dyson wishes he’s been more like Edward Snowden.
- Mikhail Gorbachev tries to make sense of contemporary Russia.
- Beneath it all, Marc Andreessen probably means well.
- The classroom of the future may be led by algorithms, not teachers.
- Ian Bogost believes the efficacy of algorithms is a fraud.
- Nicholas Carr worries about the ceding of moral choices to machines.
- Novelist Hari Kunzru imagines a dystopia of extreme income disparity.
- Roxane Gay argues in favor of je ne suis pas Charlie.
- Neal Gabler examines the business of product naming.
- Stephen Cave looks at geoengineering our way out of disaster.
- Google CEO Larry Page has social shortcomings which might benefit him.
- Google driverless cars must navigate the “noise” of the real world.
- Elon Musk is building a five-mile test track for Hyperloop experimentation.
- Late ’60s techno-optimism faded for some within a decade.
- Peter Diamandis is still a techno-optimist.
- Reforming the U.S. penal system is now enjoying bipartisan support.
- With tracking of e-book reading, a personal joy becomes commodified.
- Douglas Coupland almost got hooked on Oxy in the U.S. Southwest.
- Budd Schulberg and Leni Riefenstahl collaborated on a project.
- Online anonymity may get easier, not more difficult.
- Lee Miracle is a veteran, libertarian, atheist, poet and militia commander.
- Dynamic pricing is undoing the egalitarianism of the queue.
- Some young people dream of predictive computer systems.
- This year’s most exciting tech ideas are long-deferred dreams.
- The difference between driverless cars and autonomous drive.
- A brief note from 1929 about bakers.
- A brief note from 1905 about a freak pig.
- A brief note from 1926 about a rodent palace.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.