#more ray propaganda for u today

[creativeculturesandcontext]

WEEK 4

Independent

Understanding media - MARSHALL McCLUHAN

Hey if you do read these notes would like to add that this writing reminded me of that They Live by ray Nelson. Is the media we see the true message? Sorry I didn’t add this in class

A lightbulb is not a lightbulb. There is no media in a lightbuld but say if it lights up a message then there is a media.

But… The medium is the message and so the lightbulb is the medium because without it our culture would be very different.

Shakespeare is hard to understand, maybe that’s why he seems so deep..

In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message.

 Cardinal Newman said of Napoleon, “He understood the grammar of gunpow-der.” Napoleon had paid some attention to other media as well, especially the semaphore telegraph that gave him a great advantage over his enemies. He is on record for saying that “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thou-sand bayonets.”

Media has power, propaganda and nzi Germany used media to outcast jews.

 kind of massacre of the innocents. Instagram?

 “Their I.Q.’s were much higher than usual among political bosses. Why were they such a disaster?” The view of Rowse, Snow approves: “They would not listen to warnings because they did not wish to hear.” Being anti-Red made it impossible for them to read the mes-sage of Hitler. But their failure was as nothing compared to our present one. The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology. The threat of Stalin or Hitler was external. The electric technology is within the gates, and we are numb, deaf, blind, and mute about its encounter with the Gutenberg technology, on and through which the American way of life was formed. It is, however, no time to suggest strategies when the threat has not even been acknowledged to exist.

Uhh ohhh……

The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of speech.

I experience this whenever a story is on even if it’s a kids one  I zone in on it and forget about world, I don’t notice any media w words and stuff

 Subliminal and docile acceptance of media impact has made them prisons without walls for their human users. As A. J. Liebling remarked in his book The Press, a man is not free if he cannot see where he is going

 The medium is the message

Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of greattechnological and cultural transitions. Our "Age of.Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying todo today's job with yesterday's tools-with yester-day's concepts.

 10" In the study of ideas, it is necessary to rememberthat insistence on hard-headed clarity issues fromsentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking theperplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at allcosts is based on sheer s u p e r s t i t i on as to t he modein which human intelligence functions. Our reason-ings grasp at straws for premises and float ongossamers for deductions."—A. N. Whitehead, "Adventures in Ideas."

The "child" was an invention of theseventeenth century; he did not existin, say, Shakespeare's day. He had, upuntil that time, been merged in theadult world and there was nothing thatcould be called childhood in our sense.

This feels v wrong to say how would they know???

Media, by altering the environment, evoke in usunique ratios of sense perceptions. The extensionof any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world.Whentheseratioschange,men change this be deep stuff kindda facts tho

 The discovery of the alphabet will create forget-fulness in the learners' souls, because they will notuse their memories; they will trust to the externalwritten characters and not remember of them-selves . .. Y ou give your disciples not truth but onlythe semblance of truth; they will be heroes of manythings, and will have learned nothing; they willappear to be omniscient and will generally knownothing."-Socrates, "Phaedrus"

Socrates was boss and there are some weird as images in this book..

  Ways of seeing John Berger

 Women troug the lens of dudes w the male gaze is next level. Its everywhere. I mean strip clubs exist. “offereing up her feminity as the surveyed..”

 Im glad there was example of legitimate nude painting where the female was naked and not nude. Nakedness being the natural state and nude being sexualised.

 Good docco made me question everything especially the lst bit..

Draft work:

Design for the Real World

Victor Papanek

  INTRO

Design for the real world is a book written by Victor Papanek about industrial design. In the book Victor Papanek calls out the design establishment for mass negligence and designing for the minority.

 The book is split into two parts the first titled “Like it is” which focuses on the at the time current design world of 1972 highlighting the inadequacies with business as usual. The second Part is titled “How it could be” and digs into specific design examples of what designing for the world instead of profit looks like and finishes with a projection of what the world could look like if designers starting practicing social design for the betterment of humanity.

 Victor Papanek, although a designer himself did not make it a secret that he did not think highly of the design world, especially industrial design as it was in the 1970’s.  He used the book to call out designers who are partaking in “Kleenex Culture” and had a “preoccupation with making things pretty”. This is very clear in chapter 8 after highlighting five myths that underly the current design profession as it was. Followed by 6 areas where design has not yet been focused and where social good would be inherent in the work of the designer. He then ends the chapter with “These are six possible directions in which the design profession not only can but must go if it is to do a worthwhile job. So far the designers have neither realised the challenge nor responded to it. So far the action of the profession has been comparable to what would happen if all medical doctors were to forsake general practice and surgery, and concentrate exclusively on dermatology and cosmetics.” (pg. 184) Sentences like this that very bluntly called out bad behaviours and sometimes even naming specific industry leaders who were promoting profit seeking design for the privileged are throughout the book. What effect this has on book

Modernism

  Sustainability and social responsibility Mana Toanga.

—the book joined a groundswell of important critiques of modernism and postwar excess in architecture, design, industry, and corporate America. https://www.metropolismag.com/ideas/rereading-design-for-the-real-world/

  Looked at the design world and didn’t really like what he saw.

“has been comparable to what would happen if all medical doctors were to forsake general practice and surgery, and concentrate exclusively on dermatology and cosmetics.” Before tree of knowledge

  How the design wrld reacted.

“Form follows function,” Louis Sullivan’s battle cry of the 1880’s and 1890’s, was followed by Frank Lloyd wright’s “form and function are one.” But semantically all the statements from horatio Greenough to the germn Bauhaus are meaningless. The concept that what works well will of necessity look well, has been a lame excuse for all the sterile, operating room like furniture and implements  of the twenties and thirties. A dining table of the period might have a top, well proportioned in glistening white marble, the legs carefully nurtured for maximum strength with minimum materials in gleaming stainless steel. And the first reaction on encountering such a table is to lie down on it and have your appendix extracted.

The function complex is introduced showing the dynamic actions and relationships that make up design.

[savetopnow]

2018-03-21 00 LINUX now

LINUX

Linux Academy Blog

Linux Academy Weekly Roundup 110

Announcing Python 3 for System Administrators

Linux Academy Weekly Roundup 109

The Story of Python 2 and 3

Happy International Women’s Day!

Linux Insider

Google Opens Maps APIs and World Becomes Dev Playground

New Raspberry Pi Packs More Power

SpaceChain, Arch Aim to Archive Human Knowledge in Space

Deepin Desktop Props Up Pardus Linux

Kali Linux Security App Lands in Microsoft Store

Linux Journal

GStreamer Major Release, OpenBMC Project, Playerunknown's Battlegrounds Free Mobile Version and More

diff -u: Intel Design Flaw Fallout

Tails Security Update, Companies Team Up to Cure Open Source License Noncompliance, LG Expanding webOS and More

Weekend Reading: All Things Bash

Security: 17 Things

Linux Magazine

OpenStack Queens Released

Kali Linux Comes to Windows

Ubuntu to Start Collecting Some Data with Ubuntu 18.04

CNCF Illuminates Serverless Vision

LibreOffice 6.0 Released

Linux Today

Moro - A Command Line Productivity Tool For Tracking Work Hours

You Can Now Transform Your Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ into a Home Theatre System

Behind the scenes with the Bitwarden password manager

How to install Ansible AWX with Docker on CentOS 7

Easily Fund Open Source Projects With These Platforms

Linux.com

Migrating to Linux: Installing Software

7 Questions to Ask About Your DevSecOps Program

Reviewing Logins on Linux

How to Use Ansible to Set Up System Monitoring with Prometheus

LFD460 Embedded Linux Development with Yocto Project

Reddit Linux

Oracle Patches Spectre for Red Hat

What got you into linux?

GStreamer (media framework) 1.14.0 new major stable release

[Linux in Africa] Graduate programme aimed at driving open source skills in South Africa | IT News Africa

[Linux in Africa] Why Linux is poised to lead the tech boom in Africa - IBM IT Infrastructure Blog

Riba Linux

Zorin OS 12.3 overview | Your Computer. Better. Easier. Faster.

MX Linux 17.1 overview | simple configuration, high stability, solid performance

How to install Neptune 5.0

Neptune 5.0 overview | an elegant out of the box experience.

How to install Pardus 17.2

Slashdot Linux

LG Releases Open-Sourced Version of webOS in Hopes To Push It Beyond TVs and Smart Refrigerators

China Approves Giant Propaganda Machine To Improve Global Image

NVIDIA RTX Technology To Usher In Real-Time Ray Tracing Holy Grail of Gaming Graphics

Lead Exposure Kills Hundreds of Thousands of Adults Every Year in the US, Study Finds

New York Power Companies Can Now Charge Bitcoin Miners More

Softpedia

Linux Kernel 3.2.101 LTS

Linux Kernel 4.14.28 LTS / 4.9.88 LTS / 4.4.122 LTS / 4.1.50 LTS / 3.18.100 EOL / 3.16.56 LTS

GStreamer 1.14.0

GParted 0.31.0

GnuCash 2.7.7

Tecmint

How to Randomly Display ASCII Art on Linux Terminal

10 ‘who’ Command Examples for Linux Newbies

Gogo – Create Shortcuts to Long and Complicated Paths in Linux

5 ‘hostname’ Command Examples for Linux Newbies

Get GOOSE VPN Subscriptions to Browse Anonymously and Securely

nixCraft

Raspberry PI 3 model B+ Released: Complete specs and pricing

Debian Linux 9.4 released and here is how to upgrade it

400K+ Exim MTA affected by overflow vulnerability on Linux/Unix

Book Review: SSH Mastery – OpenSSH, PuTTY, Tunnels & Keys

How to use Chomper Internet blocker for Linux to increase productivity

[therunnelofdreams]

From The Cinematograph Act of 1918 to the present Central Bureau of Film Certification: The only visible mouthpiece of a moralistic society.

In 1895, for the first time a film was publicly screened. A nitrate fire at the Bazar de la Charité, Paris in 1897 killed 126, one caused due to the violently flammable nitrate films. Fast forward to 1909, after several similar cases of fires caused due to the films, world’s first Cinematograph legislation was passed in Britain. It was hoped that the legislation would ensure safety by curbing the issue of cinema licensing (without any expectations). Licenses were made mandatory for public screenings. Eventually, the authorities began to control not only the conditions in which the films would be screened but also the content of the screenings. The first full-length Indian feature, D.G. Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, released in 1913. The Cinematograph Act was born in 1918 and with it film censorship in India. The 1918 Act gave the district magistrate or the commissioner of police the power to issue licences to exhibitors, and the government to appoint inspectors to examine and certify films as “suitable for public exhibition”. It wasn’t until 1920 that multiple Censor Boards were set up and rules were put into place to judge the appropriateness of films, both local and foreign, for release. “No generally and rigidly applicable rules of censorship can be laid down.” were the positive words that the general principles of the Bombay Board of Film Censors began with and then proceeded to lay out 43 objectionable subjects. Most of these objectionable subjects comprised of politically incorrect depictions from the perspective of the British authorities. The Indian cinematograph committee (ICC) of 1927-28, chaired by a former Madras high court judge, T. Rangachariar, was the first comprehensive inquiry into movie viewing, censoring and exhibiting habits in the country, and an acknowledgment by the British of cinema’s increasing popularity in India. It made several pragmatic suggestions regarding censorship and the Indian cinema but in vain like most of the painstakingly written reports that have followed since. Despite the earlier mentioned long list of objectionable subjects, Indian cinema wasn’t exactly prurient in the 1920s and 1930s. Hamarun Hindustan (1930) had an intimate scene with Sulochana and Jal Merchant. Film-maker J.B.H. Wadia recalled, years after the fact, Lalita Pawar kissing her co-star “without inhibition” in a film, and Jal Merchant and Zubeida “kissing each other quite often” in 1932’s Zarina (depending on which account you read, Zarina had a total of 34, 48 or 82 kisses). Actors kiss in the Franz Osten-directed Shiraz (1928) and A Throw Of Dice (1929). And there’s the famous kiss in Karma (1933), which has gone down in legend as being 4 minutes long, though it lasts only a minute and involves a snake and a tearful Devika Rani trying to bring a comatose Himanshu Rai to life. (July 14 2018, Livemint) Suresh Chabria writes in Light Of Asia: Indian Silent Cinema, 1912-1934, “Even mentioning British excesses, the Indian National Congress, self-governance, or even revolution in other countries was enough to earn your film a cut or a ban.” “It’s a strange phenomenon which we find in this country to see the Government-sponsored Indian News Parade claiming to give all the news to the Indian people while the Censors black-out the Nation’s beloved leaders who make the most news,” cine-journal Filmindia complained in 1945, noting that even framed photographs of national leaders were cut from films. Through the Film Inquiry Committee report submitted to the government in 1951, we get a picture of what censorship was like in the years leading up to, and just after, independence. Things were, to put it mildly, chaotic. The five censor boards examined films separately, and each had their own set of rules and local pressures. Often, a title passed by one would be rejected by another. In addition, the government—of India, or of a particular state—might deny a certificate to a film passed by the censors, a fate which could befall a noir or a war film as easily as it could a propaganda newsreel. In the same decade, it was made evident that film censorship in free India would depend not only on official sanction but on societal approval. It was then that the kiss disappeared from Indian cinema—a curtailment so long and stifling that it hasn’t fully returned yet. In film critic and historian B.D. Garga’s words, “Kissing disappeared from the Indian screen not because of a fiat of the censor but because of pressures brought on by social and religious groups.” Over the next few years, a Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC, renamed as Central Board of Film Certification in 1983) was set up, regional boards were abolished, and U and A were adopted as certification categories. “The Act of 1918 was repealed, but it was later replaced with a law not dissimilar in scope,” Arpan Banerjee notes in his essay Political Censorship And Indian Cinematographic Laws: A Functionalist-liberal Analysis. This was the Cinematograph Act of 1952, the cornerstone—and, in many ways, the millstone—of film censorship in India. The 1952 Cinematograph Act sets out the structure of censorship as it stands today: the chairperson at the top, then the board members, then the advisory panels (members of the initial examining committee and the revising committee, which do much of the actual examination of films, are drawn from these). Everyone, from the chairperson down to the advisory panel members, is a government appointee. And every government at the Centre has taken advantage of this, staffing the CBFC with party loyalists eager to make cuts and deny certificates to films critical of the establishment. The Emergency saw the most blatant use of this power, with Gulzar’s Aandhi (1975) and Amrit Nahata’s Kissa Kursi Ka (1977) banned, and Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (1975) stuck in a bureaucratic tangle, because they were perceived as critical of the Congress government. (July 14 2018, Livemint) What makes the Cinematograph Act such a problematic piece of legislation is the Section 5B of the Act, which states that any film that is against the “interests of [the sovereignty and integrity of India] the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or involves defamation or contempt of court or is likely to incite the commission of any offence” can be denied a certificate. Censors are tasked with ensuring that films provide “clean and healthy entertainment”; do not “deprave the morality of the audience”, endanger public order or “depict the modus operandi of criminals”, and so on. All these rules are not only vague but also convenient since no film can be released without a certificate from the CBFC, a government appointed body. In 1968, Abbas—already well-known as the screenwriter of Awara and Shree 420—made a 16-minute documentary, Char Shahar Ek Kahani, which had scenes showing prostitution in Mumbai. The CBFC’s examining committee handed the film an “A” certificate; after Abbas protested, the revising committee reached the same conclusion. After a fruitless appeal to the Central government, Abbas petitioned the Supreme Court, arguing that pre-censorship was antithetical to freedom of speech and expression. The court ruled against Abbas. “The censorship imposed on the making and exhibition of films is in the interests of society,” said the judgement, though it also asked Parliament and the government to do more to separate the objectionable from the socially valuable. Though Abbas’ suit was probably doomed from the start, it did have one useful fallout: the formation, in 1981, of the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT), a quasi-judicial body headed by a retired high court judge, which one could approach if unhappy with the decision of the CBFC’s examining and revising committees. (July 14 2018, Livemint) There have only been some minor developments in the years since—films must now carry no-smoking advisories, and (thankfully) it’s almost impossible to shoot a scene with a live animal. In addition to the ever-arbitrary demands of the board—a blurred brassiere here, a bleeped “virgin” there—censorship by mob has emerged as a disturbing issue. Starting with Bal Thackeray demanding his own cuts in Mani Ratnam’s Bombay in 1995, the Shiv Sena’s protests against Deepa Mehta’s Fire in 1998, religious organizations and fanatics demanding cuts in movies like Ae Dil Hai Mushkil and Padmaavat in the present times to delaying releases if the demands aren’t met, censorship by mob has been normalised. Though everyone in the industry is affected by it, they refuse to unite and speak against it. “Bollywood does not care,” director Dibakar Banerjee says, “because it knows it will somehow navigate through the bureaucratic red tape to survive. It’s a vestige of the licence raj.” In an interview to The Hindu in January 2002, Vijay Anand, director of Guide and Jewel Thief and the CBFC chief at the time, was asked whether the media was right to pick on the board’s decisions. “Why not?”, he replied “We are the visible mouthpiece of a moralistic society.” This is an uncomfortably honest self-assessment, but there’s some truth to the idea that the board isn’t entirely to blame. Film censorship in India can only be fixed if the rules governing it are overhauled and if there’s a change in attitude that has persisted since the days of the British: the tendency to treat the viewer as incapable. Movie-watchers should finally be allowed to decide for themselves whether a particular film will offend their sensibilities or not.

[themausblog-blog]

Annotated Bibliography

Al Jazeera America. “Art Spiegelman - Talk to Al Jazeera.” YouTube, YouTube, 11 Sept. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2MgJVJU53w.

Extremely in-depth interview, talks about life and other personal details about Spiegelman. Doesn't have many exact dates but extremely useful.

Baccolini, Raffaella and Zanettin, Federico. (2014). The Language of Trauma: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and its Translations. In Zanettin, Federico (Ed.) Comics in Translation (Pp.99-132). New York: Routledge. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/books?id=6m1ACwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

The Language of Trauma: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Its Translations describes the ways in which Spiegelman’s work deals with the traumatic narrative of his parents’ holocaust experience. It presents the difficult process of translating trauma into language, and the struggle to bear witness, “shattering one’s world in the hope of regaining control over one’s emotions and memories”. The essay analyzes visual structures and cues presented in Maus which reflect Spiegelman’s careful handling of translating the trauma, albeit not being able to fully capture its extent, with integrity and accuracy to detail.

Bernstein, Richard. “Chilling First-Person Tales From Cambodia.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Apr. 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/04/19/books/books-of-the-times-chilling-first-person-tales-from-cambodia.html.

Der ewige Jude (n.d.). In Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008228

This entry describes the plot of the propaganda film and its notoriety.

Franklin, Ruth (2011-10-05). “Art Spiegelman’s Genre-Defying Holocaust Work, Revisited”. The New Republic.

An article that elaborates on the personal connection Art Spiegelman has with his novel and the intensity of it’s writings and how it influenced audiences into receiving a historically accurate representation of Auschwitz.

Geepeekay | The #1 Garbage Pail Kids Website. (n.d.). Retrieved April 15, 2018, from http://geepeekay.com/

A website dedicated to documenting and keeping up-to-date with the ongoing series of Garbage Pail Kids trading cards.

Gordon, A. (n.d.). Jewish Fathers and Sons in Spiegelman's Maus and Roth's Patrimony. Retrieved April 01, 2018, from http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/gordon/

This entry discusses the relationship between Artie and Vladek, as well as some memorable scenes in the comic.

History.com Staff, “Nazi Party” History.com A&E Television Networks. Web  2009. Web. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/nazi-party Accessed April 3, 2018

This article describes the origins of the Nazi Party while providing details on the overall impact of Hitler's rule and how he altered the lives millions during WWII. This is a very informative based website that covers a lot of different points surrounding WWII, it includes a variety of thorough videos on the Holocaust and its effects of the Nazi Party before, during and after the war.

Kaplan, A. (2006). Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed! Chicago: Chicago Review Press.

A novel focusing on several different comic artists and writers lives and careers. It also touches on historically prominent events that have taken place since the creation of the industry.

Park, H. S. "Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: A Bibliographic Essay." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 29 no. 2, 2011, pp. 146-164. Project MUSE. Accessed April 2, 2018

The author provide insight on the significance of the perspective of a second generation Holocaust survivor, the credibility of the retelling of history and the overall critical impact the story of Maus has made on readers and as well on Spiegelman himself. This article goes into depth on several more topics such as identity, the use of english and the use of art within the memoir.

Ray, Michael. “Art Spiegelman.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 14 Feb. 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Art-Spiegelman.

Biography of Spiegelman highlighting important dates and events, goes into enough detail and dates everything accurately. Great for an in-depth primer for information before going into more detail with the interviews.

Shmoop Editorial Team. (2008, November 11). What Animal Allegory? in Maus: A Survivor's Tale. Retrieved April 15, 2018, from https://www.shmoop.com/maus/what-animal-allegory-symbol.html?admitad_uid=8db1b7e7ae72a9fa8063e11408c07363

This link provides detail as to how the characters in MAUS were created and why they were the animals that they were. There is a lot of symbolism that came out of creating these characters in MAUS.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.“Timeline of Events” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Web. <https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938> Accssed April 4, 2018

This link provides a easy to navigate timeline of the events of WWII. It provides brief but key pieces of information from before 1933 to after 1945. The link also provides information on different events that happened within their respective years.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Culture In The Third Reich: Disseminating The Nazi Worldview” Web. <https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007519> Accssed April 4, 2018

In this specific article, the author explains the culture found within the third reich. The article explains how the Nazi’s key goal was to influence social organizations with their ideology and policy. From art, to theatre and architecture, this piece describes how these were effected within Nazi Germany and their influence on the Germans and Jewish populations.

Wisse, Ruth R. “The Modern Jewish Canon A Journey Through Language and Culture” New York Times. 2000. Web <https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/wisse-canon.html?scp=56&sq=amos%2520oz&st=cse> Accessed April 3, 2018

The author describes the importance and significance of identity connected through language. In this case Yiddish and Hebrew spoken within communities not predominantly jewish. The article also brings up how Hitler’s rule impacted the use of Jewish language and its use within literature. Although the article discusses many interesting points on the importance of identity with one’s native language the author does talk about other aspects such as religion.

Witek, J. (2007). Art Spiegelman: Conversations. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=ZKd1aGW7EMoC&pg=PR17#v=onepage&q&f=false

The following is a novel that gives an in-depth look on the story of Art Spiegelman’s life and the hardships it took to get recognized within the comic industry.

Witek, Joseph (1989). Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. University Press of Mississippi.

A novel the analyzes how comics went from being for children, to a popular worldwide phenomenon. It details mature graphics novels underground beginning, to the importance of their popularity today.

"Art Spiegelman; A Childhood." Times [London, England], 17 Apr. 1993, p. 47. Academic OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com.library.sheridanc.on.ca/apps/doc/A115992689/AONE?u=ko_acd_shc&sid=AONE&xid=4737c4d3.

An Interview with Spiegelman going over the main points of his childhood, has a lot of small but good details about his life.

“Art Spiegelman.” Lambiek.net, Lambiek, 13 Mar. 2016, www.lambiek.net/artists/s/spiegelman.htm.

Brief but broad overview of Spiegelman's life, source is from a comic conservation website and doesn't go into many details.

“Life after Maus with Art Spiegelman [HD] Late Night Live, ABC RN.” YouTube, YouTube, 7 Oct. 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xTM-ewN9yM.

Very in-depth interview with Spiegelman, has a lot of primary-sourced information. Contains information that isn't biographical but still helpful.

“Art Spiegelman.” ADC • Global Awards & Club, adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/art-spiegelman/.

[topmixtrends]

FOR YEARS, we have been warned about the addictive and harmful impact of heavy smartphone and internet use, with physicians and brain specialists raising red flags regarding the cognitive price of these technologies. Many of us now recognize that we are addicts, often joking about it in an attempt to lesson the seriousness of this realization. But what had been missing to really drive the fact of digital dependency home was an admission by those who design the technologies that such was their intended goal. This has now changed as a cadre of IT professionals recently broke their silence on the subject, revealing the motivations behind the creation of some of the world’s most popular apps.

Speaking at an event in Philadelphia in November, Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, said: “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” A week earlier, Ramsay Brown, co-founder of Dopamine Labs, a California startup that uses artificial intelligence and neuroscience research to help companies hook people to their apps, told a CBC News reporter: “We’re really living in this new era that we’re not just designing software anymore, we’re designing minds.” To make a profit, he added, companies “need your eyeballs locked in that app as long as humanly possible. And they’re all in a technological arms race to keep you there the longest.”

These revelations confirm what at least one writer has been telling us: that our attention is increasingly treated as a commodity for profit. In his 2016 book The Attention Merchants, recently released in paperback, Tim Wu, a professor of law at Columbia University, shows us how attention, a crucial human function, became the common currency of propagandists, media executives, and internet moguls. The compulsion to prey on eyeballs, Wu argues, long predates our digital gizmos and virtual realms. The advent of mass marketing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries spawned sophisticated advertising techniques geared to arrest and hold the attention of prospective buyers. Eventually, it occurred to American entrepreneurs that information about newspaper readership could be sold to those seeking access to consumers in order to market products. Throughout the 20th century, merchants learned to harvest and barter our attention using ever newer and more efficient media. Attention became one of the hottest commodities on the planet.

Wu tracks the development and use of these technologies from political posters and radio propaganda, to the goldmine of television advertising, to today’s internet and digital media. Today, it is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and other “disruptive technologies” that are making billions of dollars reselling attention to advertisers. This attention harvest, as Wu demonstrates, is ubiquitous and ever-evolving, always looking to break new ground. We can see it all around us: advertisements on the backs of taxi seats or in the trays of X-ray machines at the airport; stickers on supermarket produce advertising Disney films; sprawling adverts on the sides of trains, buses, and streetcars. Anywhere our gaze might fall, whether by accident or from necessity, represents a potential locus of attention ambush.

According to Wu, the attention merchant’s basic modus operandi is to engage us with “apparently free stuff” and then resell our attention to others. In this regard, smartphones and tablets — and the applications that support them — represent a quantum leap in the industry’s efforts to win and hold our attention. They are the frontline harvesting machines. So efficient has this process become, and so complete the conquest, that we can say that our awareness is now being commercially farmed. Furthermore, there is no harvest “season” for this industry. It is happening all the time and around the clock: in our homes, on the street, in our workplaces, during vacations. It is a symphony of mental entrancement on a global scale.

The social effects cannot be underestimated. As Wu writes:

[U]nder competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom. Attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent.

With our unwitting participation, culture devolves into the realm of the crude and stupid. And the story does not end there. Attention capture also has an enormous influence on our politics, being used to marshal peoples and amass power. Wu tells us that, in World War I, the British discovered the power of pervasive propaganda — leaflets, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing. George Creel, a journalist who headed President Woodrow Wilson’s public information office during the war, inundated the American people with propaganda. Using more than 75,000 volunteers, he delivered over 775,000 pro-war speeches in movie theaters to an estimated 135 million people, in order to create a popular will to go to war. “In the burgeoning battle for human attention,” Wu writes, “Creel’s approach was the equivalent of carpet-bombing.”

The Nazis took political attention harvesting one step further by adding massive rallies and films to the repertoire. At his war crimes trial, Albert Speer affirmed that “technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker” had served to deprive “80 million people […] of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.” Today, jihadi groups use every means available to create a will for war, their poetry, videos, and music providing an attractive, full-fledged culture for disaffected youth to become immersed and lost in.

The consequences of this vast gambit for our attention is that we have been drawn into a kind of mental slavery. Masters of profits and propaganda are farming our minds, doing cumulative damage that may go to the very core of our humanity. As a result, our attention is becoming locked into a low level of living and functioning.

¤

Why is attention so important? What is it anyway? And how can we avoid being the willing slaves of the profiteers or political manipulators?

To give and receive attention is a fundamental human need. In the 13th century, King Frederick II of Sicily wanted to find out what language children would naturally grow up to speak if they were never spoken to. He took babies from their mothers at birth and placed them in the care of nurses who were strictly forbidden to either speak to or touch them. The babies, as it turned out, didn’t grow up to speak any language, as they all died of attention deprivation within a fortnight of the start of the experiment. A study involving less extreme methods at the University of British Columbia in 2014 found that the withdrawal of attention — ostracism — is psychologically more harmful than bullying. Negative attention, it seems, is better than no attention at all. By giving and receiving attention, we are meaningfully connected to others and to a larger social whole.

In his 1996 book Learning How to Learn, author and Sufi scholar Idries Shah argued that giving and receiving attention is a cornerstone of human behavior. According to Shah, attention exchange is often the main, underlying motive for any human interaction, regardless of the actors’ overt intention. Yet attention is a brutally limited resource. A healthy attention capacity, involving the ability to block out parts of the world in order to focus, is crucial for learning. We have to be able to properly listen, think about things, and digest and integrate knowledge into a wider context if we are to develop and grow. Attention is the basic currency of this process. Yet we have been giving it away freely to the attention merchants because we do not know that it is precious.

Wu argues that we need a balance between two kinds of attention in order to be healthy: the transitory kind that happens in natural shifts of focus during daily life, and the sustained kind, such as when we are reading a book. But such sustained attention is increasingly ceded to the deliberate and chronic summoning of transitory attention by digital technologists. Instead of a long, uninterrupted read, we are being trained to consume information piecemeal from a medley of screens. This fragmented attention results in fragmented minds, producing people who are unable to focus or think effectively. The outcome is exhaustion through overstimulation of our mind’s neuronal responses, thus weakening our executive faculties and our ability to make coherent and independent decisions.

When our attention is lured, herded, and commandeered in such a way, our full human potential is profoundly subverted. “Our life experience,” William James once said, “will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.” We become what we attend to — nothing more, nothing less. A steady and exclusive stream of reality TV, entertainment gossip, social media chatter, and “breaking news” about the latest celebrity scandal or Trump’s most recent tweets — all endlessly cycling into each other — turns us into the bland clickbait of the attention harvesters. Yet, though we justifiably consider the enslavement of bodies a terrible wrong, we willingly surrender our minds for the profit of others. This new, almost hip, kind of slavery is sought, not fought.

Like a balanced diet, a healthy capacity for attention enables us to engage and disengage at will, thus freeing us to dwell and reflect. This continual process of focusing, defocusing, and refocusing keeps us aware of larger contexts. And this is how we learn and grow, in some cases attaining greatness in our endeavors or developing a deeper wisdom and outlook on life. “Over the coming century,” Wu writes, “the most vital human resource in need of conservation and protection is likely to be our own consciousness and mental space.” As technologists and entrepreneurs collaborate to bring us the next generation of attention harvesting devices, such as Google Glass and other “smart” wearables, it is imperative that we create spaces and blocks of time that are beyond their reach.

Periodic “unplugging” — taking “digital Sabbaths” — can help us reclaim real (non-virtual) sanctuaries, where we can again interact directly with one another and make strides toward achieving goals that require serious levels of concentration. In cultivating these habits, we also improve our general culture, our shared sense of what is truly meaningful and important. When our attention is diverted toward the crude and sensational, our cultural life suffers. By contrast, a long walk or a good read can lead not only to a healthier and more fulfilling life but also to a richer society, in all senses of that word.

As we would not throw a precious jewel into the trash, so we should not surrender our priceless and finite capacity for attention to the merchants for resale. Attention is infinitely more valuable than we think; it is a crucial tool in the process of learning that life may have more meaning than the officially propagated one.

¤

John Bell and John Zada are founders and directors of The Conciliators Guild, an initiative dedicated to highlighting the role of underlying human motivations in politics.

The post The Great Attention Heist appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2ClZokr

[bartroberts]

New Post has been published on Black Barth News

New Post has been published on http://blackbarth.com/u-s-intelligence-agencies-no-clothes/

U.S. Intelligence Agencies Have No Clothes

Share

At this point, pretty much everyone in America has seen the results of Hillary Clinton media pet, John Harwood’s recent Twitter poll.

Who do you believe America?

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) January 6, 2017

  The significance of the above cannot be overstated. U.S. intelligence agencies, like so many other national institutions, have lost nearly all credibility in the eyes of the American public. The list is long, but includes economists, politicians, the mainstream media, central bankers, the financial system, and a lot more. The loss in credibility is well deserved and has nothing to do with Russia. Rather, it’s a function of a disastrous 21st century outcome for U.S. citizens both at home and abroad. A result that was achieved under eight years of Republican rule and then eight years of Democratic rule. The results were the same whether a donkey or elephant was in charge, because the people determining policy behind the scenes never really changed (same economists, central bankers, intelligence officials, etc), and the people selling the catastrophic policies to the public definitely never changes (mainstream media and its worthless pundits).

So here we stand at a moment where trust in essentially all U.S. institutions is at a well deserved all-time low, and the best the establishment can come up with is to blame Russia. Even worse, those pushing the whole “Putin is to blame for everything” conspiracy theories, consistently refuse to back up their assertions with any evidence whatsoever. In fact, with each passing week the case looks increasingly flimsy, with the latest declassified document issued Friday being particularly suspect. Even many of those largely convinced of Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election admit the most recent report was pathetic, embarrassing and proved absolutely nothing.

Robert Parry of Consortium News summarizes the farce perfectly in his recent piece U.S. Report Still Lacks Proof on Russia ‘Hack’. Here’s how he begins the article:

Repeating an accusation over and over again is not evidence that the accused is guilty, no matter how much “confidence” the accuser asserts about the conclusion. Nor is it evidence just to suggest that someone has a motive for doing something. Many conspiracy theories are built on the notion of “cui bono” – who benefits – without following up the supposed motive with facts.

  But that is essentially what the U.S. intelligence community has done regarding the dangerous accusation that Russian President Vladimir Putin orchestrated a covert information campaign to influence the outcome of the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election in favor of Republican Donald Trump.

  Just a day after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper vowed to go to the greatest possible lengths to supply the public with the evidence behind the accusations, his office released a 25-page report that contained no direct evidence that Russia delivered hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta to WikiLeaks.

  The DNI report amounted to a compendium of reasons to suspect that Russia was the source of the information – built largely on the argument that Russia had a motive for doing so because of its disdain for Democratic nominee Clinton and the potential for friendlier relations with Republican nominee Trump.

  But the report’s assessment is more than just a reasonable judgment based on a body of incomplete information. It is tendentious in that it only lays out the case for believing in Russia’s guilt, not reasons for doubting that guilt.

  For instance, while it is true that many Russian officials, including President Putin, considered Clinton to be a threat to worsen the already frayed relationship between the two nuclear superpowers, the report ignores the downside for Russia trying to interfere with the U.S. election campaign and then failing to stop Clinton, which looked like the most likely outcome until Election Night.

  If Russia had accessed the DNC and Podesta emails and slipped them to WikiLeaks for publication, Putin would have to think that the National Security Agency, with its exceptional ability to track electronic communications around the world, might well have detected the maneuver and would have informed Clinton.

  So, on top of Clinton’s well-known hawkishness, Putin would have risked handing the expected incoming president a personal reason to take revenge on him and his country. Historically, Russia has been very circumspect in such situations, usually holding its intelligence collections for internal purposes only, not sharing them with the public.

Another very good breakdown of the clownishness of the latest intel report was written by noted anti-Putin activist Masha Gessen in The New York Review of Books. Like many others, she finds the obsession with RT within the report bizarre to say the least. She notes:

Finally, the bulk of the rest of the report is devoted to RT, the television network formerly known as Russia Today.

  A seven-page annex to the report details RT activities, including hosting third-party candidate debates, broadcasting a documentary about the Occupy Wall Street movement and “anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts on public health”—perfectly appropriate journalistic activities, even if they do appear on what is certainly a propaganda outlet funded by an aggressive dictatorship. An entire page is devoted to RT’s social media footprint: the network appears to score more YouTube views than CNN (though far fewer Facebook likes). Even this part of the report is slightly misleading: RT’s tactics for inflating its viewership numbers in order to secure continued Kremlin funding has been the subject of some convincing scholarship. That is the entirety of the case the intelligence agencies have presented: Putin wanted Trump to win and used WikiLeaks and RT to ensure that outcome.

Indeed, it appears the intelligence community is more concerned that RT is doing a better job than U.S. journalists at covering issues Americans care about than it is about Russia “hacking the election.” She also concludes:

Despite its brevity, the report makes many repetitive statements remarkable for their misplaced modifiers, mangled assertions, and missing words. This is not just bad English: this is muddled thinking and vague or entirely absent argument…

  It is conceivable that the classified version of the report, which includes additional “supporting information” and sourcing, adds up to a stronger case. But considering the arc of the argument contained in the report, and the principle findings (which are apparently “identical” to those in the classified version), this would be a charitable reading. An appropriate headline for a news story on this report might be something like, “Intel Report on Russia Reveals Few New Facts,” or, say, “Intelligence Agencies Claim Russian Propaganda TV Influenced Election.” Instead, however, the major newspapers and commentators spoke in unison, broadcasting the report’s assertion of Putin’s intent without examining the arguments.

Which brings me to the biggest red flag in the entire intelligence report. The part where it states:

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

If any agency should have high confidence it’s the NSA, and pretty much every security expert I follow seems to agree. First, here’s what Bruce Schneier wrote in his recent piece, Attributing the DNC Hacks to Russia:

Attribution is easier if you are monitoring broad swaths of the Internet. This gives the National Security Agency a singular advantage in the attribution game. The problem, of course, is that the NSA doesn’t want to publish what it knows.

Isn’t that interesting. The one agency with the most information is the one least confident in the conclusion. Why only moderate confidence from the NSA? I wonder.

Schneier isn’t the only one of course. As famed NSA whistleblower William Binney noted in a recent article coauthored with Ray McGovern, The Dubious Case on Russian ‘Hacking’:

With respect to the alleged interference by Russia and WikiLeaks in the U.S. election, it is a major mystery why U.S. intelligence feels it must rely on “circumstantial evidence,” when it has NSA’s vacuum cleaner sucking up hard evidence galore. What we know of NSA’s capabilities shows that the email disclosures were from leaking, not hacking.

Here’s the difference:

  Hack: When someone in a remote location electronically penetrates operating systems, firewalls or other cyber-protection systems and then extracts data. Our own considerable experience, plus the rich detail revealed by Edward Snowden, persuades us that, with NSA’s formidable trace capability, it can identify both sender and recipient of any and all data crossing the network.

  Leak: When someone physically takes data out of an organization — on a thumb drive, for example — and gives it to someone else, as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning did. Leaking is the only way such data can be copied and removed with no electronic trace.

  Because NSA can trace exactly where and how any “hacked” emails from the Democratic National Committee or other servers were routed through the network, it is puzzling why NSA cannot produce hard evidence implicating the Russian government and WikiLeaks. Unless we are dealing with a leak from an insider, not a hack, as other reporting suggests. From a technical perspective alone, we are convinced that this is what happened.

Again, if any agency should have high confidence, it is the NSA.

Moving along, the U.S. government’s case gets even weaker the more you dig into it. A perfect example can be seen in how poorly State Department spokesman Robert Kirby handled a few questions during a recent press conference. Here’s the clip:

Three major red flags appear in this exchange. First, Mr. Kirby admits that no evidence has been provided to the public regarding Russian hacking and distribution of information to Wikileaks, and that none would be forthcoming.

Second, Mr. Kirby repeatedly insists that the fact “all 17 intelligence agencies” came to the same conclusion should be sufficient for the American public in the absence of any actual proof. To this I reply:

I don’t know about you, but the fact that seventeen agencies representing a bipartisan status quo that has been catastrophically wrong about pretty much everything came to the same conclusion, does not inspire confidence or credibility in the mind of this citizen.

Finally, there’s red flag number three. When AP reporter Matt Lee follows up wondering why the WMD assessment debacle holds no relevance to the current intelligence assessment, Mr. Kirby responds by highlighting all of “the kinds of gains that have been made in intelligence and analysis since then.”

Here’s the problem. The Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper does not have clean hands when it comes to the WMD affair. He also blatantly lied to the American people with regard to NSA surveillance before being called out by Edward Snowden. As Binney and McGovern explain:

Mr. Trump’s skepticism is warranted not only by technical realities, but also by human ones, including the dramatis personae involved. Mr. Clapper has admitted giving Congress on March 12, 2013, false testimony regarding the extent of the National Security Agency’s collection of data on Americans. Four months later, after the Edward Snowden revelations, Mr. Clapper apologized to the Senate for testimony he admitted was “clearly erroneous.” That he is a survivor was already apparent by the way he landed on his feet after the intelligence debacle on Iraq.

  Mr. Clapper was a key player in facilitating the fraudulent intelligence. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put Mr. Clapper in charge of the analysis of satellite imagery, the best source for pinpointing the location of weapons of mass destruction — if any.

  When Pentagon favorites like Iraqi émigré Ahmed Chalabi plied U.S. intelligence with spurious “evidence” on WMD in Iraq, Mr. Clapper was in position to suppress the findings of any imagery analyst who might have the temerity to report, for example, that the Iraqi “chemical weapons facility” for which Mr. Chalabi provided the geographic coordinates was nothing of the kind. Mr. Clapper preferred to go by the Rumsfeldian dictum: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” (It will be interesting to see if he tries that out on the President-elect Friday.)

  A year after the war began, Mr. Chalabi told the media, “We are heroes in error. As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful.” By that time it was clear there were no WMD in Iraq. When Mr. Clapper was asked to explain, he opined, without adducing any evidence, that they probably were moved into Syria. 

To conclude, I certainly think it is important to know if the Russian government hacked the DNC/Podesta and then handed that information to Wikileaks. Likewise, such an explosive claim necessitates publicly available evidence given the horrible track record of U.S. intelligence agencies. Until such evidence is made available I, like countless other Americans, will tend to believe Wikileaks, which has a track record of proving its claims and being accurate, as opposed to U.S. intelligence, which doesn’t.

Source

[savetopnow]

2018-03-12 00 TECH now

TECH

Ars Techica

Elon Musk debuted a trailer “for the next part of the human story” at SXSW

Elon Musk says The Boring Company’s Loop will prioritize pedestrians, cyclists

Google claims it’s going to build its proprietary AMP using Web standards

Potent malware that hid for six years spread through routers

Video: We all find something special about our generational cadre

Buzzfeed Tech

Musical.ly Is Struggling To Deal With Self-Harm Content

Here’s What’s Up With "Smart Guns" — And Why You Can’t Buy One In The US

Want To Make Millions? Copy Someone’s Cryptocurrency Project.

Despite Losing Money, Uber Just Signed An Endorsement Deal With One Of The World's Most Valuable Athletes

Five Questions We Have About Twitter’s New “Health” Plan

CNet

MWC 2018: a show remembered more for political unease than tech - CNET

Optoma UHD60 review - CNET

How to get better sleep in 2018 - CNET

Razer Core V2 review - CNET

Donald Trump's tweets show he's a modern man, Putin says - CNET

Clean Technica

Tesla Model 3: The Things “Big Name Reviewers” Don’t Talk About

The Future Of US EVs : Interview With The Electric Power Research Institute

The Trickster & The Trump — The Politics Of America Seen Through The Lens Of Mythology

Is Trump Putin’s Puppet? And If He Is, What’s That Got To Do With Cleantech?

Will Tesla Model 3 Lead Market Segment Like Tesla Model S Does?

Hacker News

Reptile: A Scalable Meta-Learning Algorithm

Paternoster Lifts: Cyclic Chain Elevators with No Buttons, Doors or Stops

Ask HN: Were we more productive 10, 15, or 20 years ago?

How your ethereum can be stolen through DNS rebinding

Sleeping in rooms with even a little light can increase risk of depression

Mashable

Doctors find virus in a pond, use it to destroy antibiotic-resistant bacteria in man's heart

Dancer rides white horse onto nightclub floor, chaos ensues in Florida

Which news platform will win in a post-Facebook world?

'SNL' reveals unseen 'Black Panther' scene that includes your new favorite character

Sterling K. Brown stars in 'This Is U.S.,' the saddest political show in America

Motherboard

Feds Bust CEO Allegedly Selling Custom BlackBerry Phones to Sinaloa Drug Cartel

Scientists Are Looking At Magnetic Particles and Fungus to Fix Potholes

YouTube Is Full of Easy-to-Find Neo-Nazi Propaganda

Google Is Back In Canadian Court to Fight Global Search Censorship

There Is Liquid Water Over 400 Miles Below Earth’s Surface

New York Times Technology

Broadcom’s Other Regulatory Hurdle: How It Treats Customers

Ex-Leader of Baltimore County Schools, a Tech Booster, Pleads Guilty to Perjury

Contributing Op-Ed Writer: YouTube, the Great Radicalizer

AT&T Backs Off Political Argument in Antitrust Case

Dropbox Chief to Join Elite Ranks of Idea-to-I.P.O. Founders

Recode

How to watch Kara Swisher interview chef José Andrés live at SXSW today

How to watch former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett live from SXSW today

How to watch Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi live from SXSW today

Former Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell could be Trump’s next top economic adviser

Watch Kara Swisher interview psychotherapist Esther Perel about the boundaries tech has created in our relationships

Reddit Technology

Female inventor creates 'Nanowood' — a material that could (really) save the planet

With laser light, scientists create first X-ray holographic images of viruses

Secunia retires Personal Software Inspector (PSI)

Google and Apple are in a tight race to acquire the most promising AI startups

Facebook Fights Fakery by Burying Real Reporting

Reuters Technology

Internet tycoon challenges Deutsche Telekom to team up on German broadband

Amazon video service looking to expand Indian regional content

China eyes 'black tech' to boost security as parliament meets

Panasonic considers selling security camera factory in China: Nikkei

New German minister to challenge Google and Facebook's presentation of news

Slashdot

Ubuntu Linux 18.04 'Bionic Beaver' Beta 1 Now Available For Download

Could This Bold New Technique Boost Gravitational-Wave Detection?

Are The Alternatives Even Worse Than Daylight Saving Time?

ESR's Newest Project: An Open Hardware/Open Source UPS

Chinese Police Begin Tracking Citizens With Face-Recognizing Smart Glasses

TechCrunch

Gillmor Gang: TV Dinner

Elon Musk crashes SXSW panel to talk about space travel

Original Content podcast: ‘Everything Sucks!’ overcomes our skepticism

Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Joe Tsai invest $20 million in Rent the Runway

GV partner Lo Toney wants to raise $50 million to fund diverse investors

The Next Web

Will remote work ever become mainstream?

Europe wants to tackle fake news — if it could only define it first

The 13 most common blockchain myths explained

How to protect your website from cryptojacking attacks

Make your travel memories pop with these two super-cool photo accessories

The Verge

Ernie Cline’s Ready Player One gets a tiny adaptation in this music video

The Unfriended sequel is clever, dour, and has nothing to say

A Quiet Place blends horror and drama in a silent world

The Folio Society’s edition of A Wrinkle in Time celebrates nonconformity

Why people still worry about the falling Chinese space station — despite the low odds

WSJ Tech

Intel May Intervene in Broadcom's Effort to Buy Qualcomm

Do Cellphones Really Cause Brain Cancer? We Have Answers.

FDA Opens Way for You to Test for Cancer Risk by Mail

Broadcom Schedules Vote on Plan to Become a U.S. Company

Auto Industry's Cure for Electric Car Blues: Be More Like Tesla

Wired

Don’t Do Drugs and Watch ‘Annihilation’

‘Dr. Strangelove’ Is Basically a Documentary

Total Clips

Aliens Would Probably Like It If You Gave them Flowers

All About HomePod