Daniel Rourke /stream

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Since the pandemic began, the seemingly mundane protocols of Zoom have become a significant part of many people’s daily lives: finding the right link, setting up the peripherals, managing the glitches…

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“If you look at Google Earth, it’s springtime everywhere,” explains Gopal Shah, Google Earth’s product manager, in a YouTube interview. In a TED talk he boasts that Google Earth is “cloud-free,”…

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While video game music has become more and more popular as the years have rolled by, there once was a time when it was seen as an afterthought; the tunes that…

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Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once. Not time itself, just the convention of…

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While video game music has become more and more popular as the years have rolled by, there once was a time when it was seen as an afterthought; the tunes that…

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Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once. Not time itself, just the convention of…

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Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be…

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Onstage at the November 20 Democratic debate, presidential candidate and Universal Basic Income evangelist Andrew Yang used one of his precious minutes of speaking time to casually claim that “data is…

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Among the white nationalists on 4chan’s “politically incorrect,” or /pol/ board and on “alt-right” Twitter — or anywhere you might run into a picture of Pepe the Frog — there is…

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When Caitlin Cornell looked down her microscope, she saw large bright spots against a black background. They resembled miniature suns, blazing against the backdrop of space.

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In the awful, wearying months in which Harvey Weinstein’s ritualistic mistreatment of women was being recounted daily in the media, I found myself, like so many others, wondering and talking about…

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The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it's positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody?

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There's no denying that keeping livestock has deeply benefited humanity over the millennia. But, while sheep and cows may have adapted well to farm life, there's one animal humans like to…

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As I was being wheeled out of the post-anesthesia care unit at Mount Sinai, three incisions across my abdomen freshly glued shut and fentanyl warm in my veins, a nurse bustled…

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Let’s talk about what it means to destroy yourself. In the relatively short time I’ve been alive, I have made an art out of self-destruction. I’ve placed myself in frightening situations…

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My father’s family came to the US in the 1930s, a Jewish family fleeing Nazi Germany. My life has gone well, and I suppose I should be grateful for the way…

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If the 20th century promised better living through chemistry, the 21st century has promised better living through digital technology.

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Since the pandemic began, the seemingly mundane protocols of Zoom have become a significant part of many people’s daily lives: finding the right link, setting up the peripherals, managing the glitches…

Bookmark

“If you look at Google Earth, it’s springtime everywhere,” explains Gopal Shah, Google Earth’s product manager, in a YouTube interview. In a TED talk he boasts that Google Earth is “cloud-free,”…

Bookmark

Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once. Not time itself, just the convention of…

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In mid-January, a group of computer scientists and biologists from the University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard announced that they had created an entirely new life form — xenobots, the world’s…

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Years ago, I started writing a short story, the premise of which was this: All the clocks in the world stop working, at once. Not time itself, just the convention of…

Bookmark

Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be…

Bookmark

Onstage at the November 20 Democratic debate, presidential candidate and Universal Basic Income evangelist Andrew Yang used one of his precious minutes of speaking time to casually claim that “data is…

Bookmark

In 2007, Kenneth Stanley, a computer scientist at the University of Central Florida, was playing with Picbreeder, a website he and his students had created, when an alien became a race…

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When Caitlin Cornell looked down her microscope, she saw large bright spots against a black background. They resembled miniature suns, blazing against the backdrop of space.

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“I’ll wager that there is a baby making to be aimed for that will be defined neither by the alienated misery of the status quo nor the silver absolutism of their…

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The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it's positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody?

Bookmark

There's no denying that keeping livestock has deeply benefited humanity over the millennia. But, while sheep and cows may have adapted well to farm life, there's one animal humans like to…

Bookmark

As I was being wheeled out of the post-anesthesia care unit at Mount Sinai, three incisions across my abdomen freshly glued shut and fentanyl warm in my veins, a nurse bustled…

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This piece originated as a talk at Seattle University. Well, really it originated as a question from the Seattle Non-Binary Collective, a group of Seattle residents and visitors with genders beyond…

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My father’s family came to the US in the 1930s, a Jewish family fleeing Nazi Germany. My life has gone well, and I suppose I should be grateful for the way…