A public library in Ohio is celebrating the life of one of its most loyal patrons, a retired social worker named Dan Pelzer.

When Ocean’s Godori first came out, I was somewhat surprised by some of the reader reactions. Many people expressed frustration over words not being directly defined, the frequent usage of Korean, the spelling of some of that Korean that made it difficult to look up, and the glossary not being more prominently displayed. This is, of course the sci-fi genre, one that usually by necessity involves unknown terms, foods, and slang that you assimilate as you keep reading. Sometimes that worldbuilding is like sinking into a warm bath and sometimes it operates like a jarring smash cut, as anyone who has picked up A Clockwork Orange with its opening of “we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry” can attest to.

From lending to payments to stock trading to crypto, prominent fintech businesses have found a competitive edge not in technology itself, but in using narratives about technology as a smokescreen for the profitable arbitrage of financial regulations. This modus operandi is encouraged by Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists, who decide which businesses to fund and often provide advice, gin up hype, and lobby for the businesses they’ve chosen. Our society continues to shower VCs with public subsidies, but as I argue in this brief post, if regulatory arbitrage is what we’re getting from Silicon Valley’s VCs in exchange, it’s well past time to reconsider this relationship. 

Created by a team affiliated with Brick House publishing cooperative, a platform known as Briet is inviting publishers to sell rather than license their e-books to libraries, and several independent publishers are on board.

Networked publishing, native analytics, and $100M earned by indie publishers

A new disclosure shows how corporations and individuals, including many in the crypto business, wrote big checks while seeking favor from the president.

Humidity be damned, this month’s crop of books is sparking with exciting new premises and relationship dynamics. You’ve got robots-turned-cooks, an economy built entirely on mandatory memory collection, a polyamorous throuple romantasy, Practical Magic but make it a mother/daughter tale. And if you were a fan of Sideways Stories from Wayside School and/or Holes, have I got the adult fantasy debut for you…

I want people on the web to have this freedom. I want this freedom for myself and for ordinary internet users everywhere.

I got a bit concerningly obsessed with birds for a few months.

Where do these gendered presumptions even come from, and how pervasive are they? Is it common to assume that a frog is a “he?” What about a bear, or a bird, or a cat, or a pig? I wanted to know: Which animals do we gender, and why?