wkimball @ gizmodo
What Myspace Lost
We’re all renters; your photos are on the wall, but the building is not yours and the landlord can evict you and also burn all your stuff.
Why Moscow's Climate Strike Turnout Was Devastatingly Small
While Berlin, London, and Melbourne reported drawing around 100,000 Climate Strike participants each, Greenpeace tweeted photos of only sparse gatherings in cities across Russia. In Moscow, a small group of activists took turns holding signs one at a time, due to Russia’s restrictive laws on public protest.
Why These Social Networks Failed So Badly
Their obituaries tell us what we already know–that your feed could look a lot more interesting, more avant-garde, joyous, local, intimate, kinky, weird, and hilarious–and yes, scarier and even more hateful than it does now.
What a month of gambling on the 2020 election taught me
A wild ride on the online prediction markets made me a sociopathic news hound, and also rich.
What is the mathematical probability of getting pooped on by a pigeon in NYC?
Hopes&Fears asked mathematician, probability expert, author, Ph.D Peter Olofsson to spend hours of his time devising a formula for the likelihood of getting pooped on by a pigeon in New York City. Miraculously, he humored us. Read the entire proof of concept or scroll down to the end for the answer!
How Transphobic Anti-LGBTQ Groups Hijacked a Small Town's Fight for Equality
When I met Jocelyn, a Parkersburg, West Virginia woman in her early 20s, she was coming off her fourth job interview at the third fast food restaurant in two weeks. She’d made it to the second round with the manager, who’d just told her he wanted to know “how it looked on paper.” On paper, she looked great; her resume listed two previous management positions at fast food franchises before the age of 22. But he was referring to the other paper: the birth certificate.
Pittsburgh Sex Workers Are Being Charged With Carrying Condoms, or, 'Instruments of Crime'–Raising the Question of Who Is at Risk
Condoms are now “instruments of crime,” according to the Allegheny County, PA police, which has been using them to charge sex workers with first-degree misdemeanors, ostensibly toward the broader goal of cracking down on human trafficking. The news, first reported by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review earlier this month, has pitted the county DA against a coalition of sex worker and public health advocates with debate that SESTA/FOSTA have made mainstream: is it worth jeopardizing the health and s...
Sex for All
MP candidate, activist and sex worker Charlotte Rose provides a remedy that can't be found in a hospital.
Over 60,000 People Disappeared; Here Are the Families Trying to Find Them
If you pass a protest for “the Disappeared” today, it’s probably not referencing the migrant families separated by Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, but another massive population of people separated from their families whom we don’t hear about much: an estimated 60,000-100,000 people–nearly enough to fill Yankee Stadium twice over–who who have gone missing since the start of the Sri Lankan Civil War in the 1980s. After the war ended in 2009, thousands of Tamil fighters surrendered but were neve...
Trapped in the Kafka-esque revolving door of the NYC shelter ...
I aided and commissioned an essay by activist Scott Andrew Hutchins.
Silly and Cruel Beauty Gadgets That Were Destined for Failure
You are ugly, and if you didn’t notice, perusing a history of American cosmetic marketing will point out all of your innumerable flaws until you feel that god has damned you.
The Endless Job of Rhizome’s New Digital Archivist Dragan Espenschied
Dragan Espenschied on attempting to archive every page made through Geocities.
"People Could Literally Die" Over the Time It Takes ICE to Make a Photocopy, the ACLU Says
On Saturday, we reported the ACLU’s claims of physical and verbal abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against approximately 288 Iraqi nationals (exact number is growing) who would face immediate deportation, were it not for a judge’s order granting them a temporary emergency stay....
Paradise maps, monk tabloids and monsters: 1,000 years of medieval cosmography — Hopes&Fears — flow "Books"
Paradise maps, monk tabloids and monsters: 1,000 ye...