Tag: Good intentions
17 Indie Films You Must See in 2024
Navigating the Sundance Film Festival can be a tricky endeavor. The stacked screening schedule is practically made to send cinephiles into a tailspin: If the line for the new Steven Soderbergh movie starts forming at 9 p.m., but a nifty-sounding documentary is playing across town at six, can you make it to both? Is it better to go for the crowd-pleaser or for the polarizing experience? Which of the 91 films selected will become this year’s Past Lives?
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The Quest to Build a Better Birdhouse
This article originally appeared in Undark Magazine.
In 2016, Ox Lennon was trying to peek in the crevices inside a pile of rocks. Lennon, who uses they/them pronouns, considered everything from injecting builders’ foam into the tiny spaces to create a mold to dumping a heap of stones into a CT scanner. Still, they couldn’t get the data they were after: how to stack rocks so that a mouse wouldn’t squeeze through, but a small lizard could hide safely
Don’t Just Assume That Language Is Harmful
In my work as a senior editor at a scientific journal, the most challenging arguments I mediate among reviewers, authors, other editors, and readers are not about research methods, empirical data, or subtle points of theory but about which terms describing vulnerable groups are acceptable and which are harmful. My field—addiction and drug policy—has a tradition of savage infighting over language. Are the people whom earlier generations derided as vagrants or bums more appropriately termed homeless people, people who
Prepare for the Political Pollsterbots
Even a halfway-decent political campaign knows you better than you know yourself. A candidate’s army of number crunchers vacuums up any morsel of personal information that might affect the choice we make at the polls. In 2020, Donald Trump and the Republican Party compiled 3,000 data points on every single voter in America. In 2012, the data nerds helped Barack Obama parse the electorate to microtarget his door-knocking efforts toward the most-persuadable swing voters. And in 1960, John F. Kennedy