September 10, 2019
To celebrate the publication of Sharenthood: Why We Should Think before We Talk about Our Kids Online, we sat down with author Leah A. Plunkett to talk about what sharenting is and what adults can do to balance sharing with children’s rights to privacy.
March 11, 2019
Philosopher Nicholas Agar makes the case for naming the new era the Social Age, named for the significance to human affairs of social interactions, in this excerpt from How to Be Human in the Digital Economy.
January 31, 2019
The light is everything, here, an islander said to me on the phone last week. In Orkney, the Scottish islands where I have spent the last decade researching energy futures, sunlight ebbs and flows fast.
January 14, 2019
If you are the sort of person who makes new year resolutions, and the sort who falls short, life hackers have honed the past few decades of research on motivation into a regime of remarkable efficacy, says Joseph M. Reagle, Jr., author of Hacking Life: Systematized Living and Its Discontents.
August 11, 2017
On August 5th, VICE reported on a controversial document that espoused sexist beliefs written by a Google employee and circulated within the company . Jennifer Lieberman, author of Power Lines weighs in on “memogate”arguing against the widely held belief that technology always leads to progress.
February 24, 2017
This Oscars weekend Hidden Figures, the previously untold story of three brilliant African-American women working at NASA during the Space Race, is a favorite to win best picture at the 89th Academy Awards. Marie Hicks’s new book Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing tackles similar issues of forgotten history, exploring how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women.
October 11, 2016
In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, we look back at last year’s essay (“Changing the Face of Computing—One Stitch at a Time”) by Yasmin Kafai and Jane Margolis about the legacy of the pioneering British mathematician who became the first computer programmer.
September 6, 2016
Shake off some of that Labor Day rust by checking out the first part of a Q & A with Mike Smith and Rahul Telang who are the authors of Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment. Their book is about how big data is transforming the creative industries, and how those industries can use lessons from Netflix, Amazon, and Apple to fight back.
August 19, 2016
The daguerreotype, invented in France, came to America in 1839. It was, as Sarah Kate Gillespie’s book The Early American Daguerreotype shows, something wholly and remarkably new: a product of science and innovative technology that resulted in a visual object. We’re celebrating World Photo Day with an excerpt from The Early American Daguerreotype.