Epicene Cyborg

U.S. banks deploy visual AI tools to monitor customers and workers.

The Pandemic Will Be More Deadly This Year. Consider the surging case count in India. A false sense of complacency is discouraging any course correction, and numbers could get worse still. Wouldn’t have happened if we’d done better with vaxes.

They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War.

Perceptual grounding for long-distance vowel harmony.

America’s Ham-Fisted Elite Is Harming Our Kids.

Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud.

Relearning The Language Of A Lost World.

Towards a rigorous understanding of societal responses to climate change.

Most Americans want to end lifetime Supreme Court appointments.

Philanthropic Monsters.

Biden is poised to transform how America treats industry. He must follow through.

Oil companies don’t deserve reparations for fossil fuel bans. They’ll still want them.

How Mistreating Nursing Home Staff Helped Spread Covid-19.

Since the 1980s, intellectual property rights have moved from the periphery of conflicts over the shape and future of the world economy to the center.

I don’t seek revolution, but rather renaissance.

How the chip shortage got so bad — and why it’s so hard to fix.

What Is Hospitality? The Current Answer Doesn’t Work. The host-guest relationship puts all the onus on the server, particularly during the pandemic, and points to the dysfunction at the heart of the business.

Least Vaccinated U.S. Counties Have Something in Common: Trump Voters. Natural selection at work.

Good Transit Is Useless If People Can’t Live Near It.

Why has nuclear power been a flop? We should fix this and build many safer reactors.

On the epidemiology of influenza.

SARS-CoV-2 Cardiac Involvement in Young Competitive Athletes. Looks like cardiac problems might have been overstated previously.

Renting Is Terrible. Owning Is Worse. A third option is necessary: a way to rent without making someone else rich.

Error-riddled data sets are warping our sense of how good AI really is. Our understanding of progress in machine learning has been colored by flawed testing data.

The Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh.

The misinformation virus. Lies and distortions don’t just afflict the ignorant. The more you know, the more vulnerable you can be to infection.

Biden Finally Got to Say No to the Generals.

Libraries and Pandemics: Past and Present. The 1918 influenza pandemic had a profound impact on how librarians do their work, transforming libraries into centers of community care.

Mark Zuckerberg, the modern Bond villain, is now coming for your children.

Biden isn’t ending the Afghanistan War, he’s privatizing it: Special Forces, Pentagon contractors, intelligence operatives will remain.

These Countries Did Well With Covid. So Why Are They Slow on Vaccines? Japan, South Korea and Australia have inoculated tiny percentages of their populations. The delays risk unwinding their relative successes.

America Has Pandemic Senioritis.

A Report from the After Times. Normal is never coming back.

It’s time to expand Social Security benefits — and here’s how to pay for it.

How the coronavirus origin story is being rewritten by a guerrilla Twitter group.

The Nation’s Corn Belt Has Lost a Third of Its Topsoil.

Ethical anti-design, or designing products that people can’t get addicted to.

The Retail WTF Charts of the Year, Powered by $1,400-Stimmies and Massive Price Increases.

Why was the ancient city of Cahokia abandoned? New clues rule out one theory.

How Can We Convince Big Companies to Leave Iconic Websites Online? Nationalize them.

Sex Workers Explain Why the SAFE TECH Act Will Break the Internet. Congress is once again threatening the livelihoods and safety of sex workers with its latest attempt to reform Section 230.

Being a Go-Getter Is No Fun. New research suggests that competent employees are assigned more work—but they don’t always like it.

A massive shift is occurring in the labor market today, one that has been misinterpreted by economists of all stripes.

Social Medicine For A Better Future.

The United States of Guns.

Forced choices reveal a trade-off between cognitive effort and physical pain. I would rather endure quite a lot of pain than solve any sort of puzzle.

How the Largest Animals That Could Ever Fly Supported Giraffe-Like Necks.

Autochromes – part 1.

Less than 1 in 4 workers has gone back to the office as businesses plot a wider reopening.

99.992% of fully vaccinated people have dodged COVID, CDC data shows.

In My Hometown, Opioids Are Still Stealing Lives. Mine too.

There are No Good Arguments for Intellectual Property.

How to fight back against Google FLoC.

This Glacier in Alaska Is Moving 100 Times Faster Than Normal.

What are the most important statistical ideas of the past 50 years?

The Consumer Price Index Is Not Economic Reality.

Education Doesn’t Work.

Social networks neither ‘social’ nor ‘networks’ — what should we call them?

Physical inactivity is associated with a higher risk for severe COVID-19 outcomes: a study in 48,440 adult patients.

Anti-Vax Activists Are Quietly Bending State Politics To Their Will.

America’s year of hunger: how children and people of color suffered most.

Making sense of conspiracy theorists as the world gets more bizarre.

Did climate change cause societies to collapse? New research upends the old story.

Adherence to the vegetarian diet may increase the risk of depression: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies.

Vaccine Dose Reminds Sedentary Man What Muscle Soreness Feels Like.

Hello Goodbye. The more conversations machines produce for us, the harder it will become to say something non algorithmic. Hell world.

Color Photos of the Auto Shows From the 1950s.

Common approach to diversity in higher education reflects preferences of white Americans.

Victory for municipal broadband as Wash. state lawmakers end restrictions.

Within the drumbeat of bad decisions, ‘impossible’ is toxic.

Regeneron’s Antibody Drug Can Help Prevent Infections, Study Says.

The dispiriting housing boom.

More Trouble for Evergreen Suez Canal Ship, Now Being Held Captive.

The Nature You See in Documentaries Is Beautiful and False. Nature documentaries mislead viewers into thinking that there are lots of untouched landscapes left. There aren’t.

Amplified Routing Loops.

Quantum computing’s reproducibility crisis: Majorana fermions.

Why has climate economics failed us? Economists could have helped in the fight against climate change. So far, they haven’t.

Florida is full of invasive species. They’re coming for the rest of us.

Ecological impacts of solar geoengineering are highly uncertain.

Snakes and Ladders.

Against “Feel Free To Take Some Time If You Need It.”

Essential, invisible: Covid has 200,000 merchant sailors stuck at sea.

The Nuclear Lightbulb.

The Gaslighting of Science.

No success like failure – a natural history of the film maudit.

Despite similar RBD mutations P.1 is easier to neutralize than B.1.351.

Landlord power is not just bad for tenants. It harms homeowners, too.

Loneliness, Anxiety and Loss: the Covid Pandemic’s Terrible Toll on Kids. But the suicide rate hasn’t gone up! According to (probably fake) statistics.

The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep among the Urban Poor.

Soldier of Misfortune. Ukraine is attracting Americans who want to fight alongside far-right extremists. What happens when radicalized soldiers like Craig Lang return home?

Our ancestors left Africa both with and without modern brains.

“Cancel culture” forgets most racism happens in private.

How a Carnivorous Mushroom Poisons Its Prey. Scientists have known for decades that oyster mushrooms feasted on roundworms—and they’ve finally figured out how their toxins work.

Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords. How warnings of AI doom gave way to primal fear of primates posting.

Work Isn’t Fulfilling Because Capitalism Is a Death March.

‘Lost golden city’ found in Egypt reveals lives of ancient pharaohs.

Did the Pandemic Speed Up Productivity Growth?

Safety is fatal. Humans need closeness and belonging but any society that closes its gates is doomed to atrophy. How do we stay open?

Shrinking sea meadows store more carbon than forests. Scientists are racing to track what’s left.

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