July 10, 2020
The U.S. Army’s Twitch channel is banning people for asking about war crimes
— people are speedrunning getting banned from their official Discord #
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on the ridiculous Harper’s open letter
— "we want to present bad ideas without losing our readers or our jobs" #
NYT on the racial inequity of coronavirus
— new federal data shows Black and Latino people disproportionately affected nationally #
Is Anyone Watching Quibi?
— New York Magazine feature on the streaming platform, with plenty of cringe from Whitman and Katzenberg #
Vanity Fair talks to comedian Ziwe Fumudoh about her IG Live show
— as Joe Berkowitz wrote, her show is "a bit like Between Two Ferns, if it had a racism fixation and the intensity of a Scientology audit" #
Poynter on how the move to capitalize “Black” happened at the AP and in many newsrooms
— the New York Times announced the style change on Tuesday #
Gwern’s experiments in creative writing with GPT-3
— in the examples, human-written text is bold, everything else was written by the AI #
Silicon Valley elite discuss journalists having too much power in private app
— in response to the leak, Srinivasan started offering Bitcoin bounties for memes mocking Taylor and other journalists #
91-DIVOC adds new graphs, reports, and additional data options
— easily the best visualization tool I've found to track the epidemic globally or down to the county level #
OpenAI’s GPT-3 model generating Python code from natural language
— this is absolutely mind-blowing #
Our Ghost-Kitchen Future
— The New Yorker's Anna Wiener digs into Reef, a parking lot company that raised $900M from SoftBank #
MrBeast ends Finger on the App after 70 hours
— the remaining four players got $20,000 each, while several others are claiming foul #
Siddhant Adlakha on watching Hamilton on film, five years after its Broadway debut
— "It was made for a different America, and today, it’s easy to wonder whether that America ever existed at all." #
Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in U.S. history
— between 15 to 26 million Americans participated in protests #
The Verge on the fight for control over The Nod
— like Another Round, the show's hosts/creators are now trying to get the rights to their work by going public #
Reddit bans /r/The_Donald, /r/ChapoTrapHouse, and 2,000 other subreddits
— also: YouTube banned Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, Richard Spencer, and more, while Twitch temporarily banned Trump #
Verizon joins Facebook/Instagram ad boycott over hate speech
— companies are pulling ads over their failure to moderate misinformation and hateful content #
Guardian investigation into how QAnon conspiracies thrive on Facebook
— more than just a platform, Facebook's algorithms actively amplify and recruit through recommendations #
Katalog
— Belgian artist Barbara Iweins photographed and categorized all 10,352 objects in her house (via) #
Apple reverses ban on Struck, a clever astrology dating app for iOS
— starting in March, Apple declared "fortune-telling" and "dating" were oversaturated, spammy categories #
Animal Talking debuts second season with Sting
— Gary Whitta's late-night talk show recorded in Animal Crossing is getting some big names #
The Dixie Chicks rename, dropping the “Dixie”
— learning from Lady Antebellum's mistake, the Chicks cleared the new name with an existing band first #
Walt Disney World and Disneyland retheming Splash Mountain to “Princess and the Frog”
— the 1989 ride was based on the 1946 film Song of the South, known for its racist stereotypes and glorified plantation setting #
Wesley Lowery on the reckoning over objectivity in newsrooms led by Black journalists
— the illusion of fairness vs. telling hard truths (via) #
No-coding SMS bots with Google Sheets and Twilio
— useful hack by the always-brilliant Nicole He (via) #
NASA names headquarters after “Hidden Figure” Mary W. Jackson
— Jackson was NASA’s first Black female engineer, portrayed by Janelle Monáe in the film adaptation of the book #
Finger On The App
— MSCHF and MrBeast's real-time contest to see who can keep their finger on their phone the longest with a prize up to $25k #
McSweeney’s catalog of Trump’s worst cruelties, collusions, corruptions, and crimes
— a categorized collection of this president's lowlights, 759 and counting #
Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm
— lazy cops using flawed facial recognition targeted a Black man in Michigan for a crime he didn't commit #
Brooklyn Nine-Nine rewriting new season from scratch
— nobody's really in the mood for a wacky show about the NYPD right now #
ProPublica editor tries to investigate an NYPD car that hit a Black teen on Halloween
— "Instead, the episode crystallized all of the ways in which the NYPD is shielded from accountability." #
Hot Pod on the public dispute over Another Round’s archives
— Heben and Tracy have tried to get the show back from Buzzfeed for years, and it may finally happen #
Polygon’s investigation into Cards Against Humanity and cofounder Max Temkin
— the reporter spoke to 21 former employees and contractors, along with many others with ties to the company and Max, who stepped down after these allegations #
Black Artists for Freedom
— some of the most powerful voices in art and media call on cultural institutions to tangibly act to eliminate racist culture #