FX’s Kindred series doesn’t know how to navigate the nuances of Octavia Butler’s genius.
An interview with Karen Levy, an associate professor of information science at Cornell, about her new book, Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance
House of the Dragon’s season 1 finale pulled the series together by becoming what Game of Thrones was at its best
Ken Kocienda, the longtime Apple designer and current exec at Humane, dropped 12 books he recommends in a tweet thread. They’re not all tech, but they’re mostly tech, and I nodded vigorously at all the ones I’ve read before. Definitely reading Longitude this weekend, too.
If you don’t know about Lena Forsén — aka the ‘Patron Saint of JPEGs’ — then a little history lesson wouldn’t go amiss today. You can read all about Forsén in my review for the London Review of Books of Dylan Mulvin’s book “Proxies.” It’s all about the standards, templates, and, yes, Playboy photographs, that invisibly shape the technological landscape around us.
[London Review of Books]
The obvious example is Peter Thiel naming his surveillance company Palantir (after an unspeakably evil scrying artifact that irreversibly corrupts its users?) but once you notice one profile of an alt-right or extremist figure mentioning how much they love Lord of the Rings, you start seeing it everywhere — including the footnotes of specious lawsuits attempting to undermine the 2020 election.
Anyways, you should read this, about an ascendant hard-right politician in Italy, whose politics are intertwined with high fantasy fandom in a way that will be unsettling to nerds of good conscience. And if you want to read more about Italy’s neo-fascist Camp Hobbit youth rallies in the 1970s, Atlas Obscura has you covered.
[The New York Times]
Ruin and recovery in the video game industry
