Prologue to Ursula K. le Guin
In the 1960s, Ursula K. le Guin represented a changing of the guard in science fiction literature. She was part of a generation of novelists who questioned the colonist mindset…
Newswires 101: Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know
If you’re a news junkie and read multiple news sources a day, you may notice sometimes that there is an article repeated almost word for word in more than one…
Our Opinions Are Correct: Why Silicon Valley is doomed to misunderstand the future, with Dr. Joy Buolamwini
Silicon Valley markets itself as the place where futures are born, and yet tech corporations have no real understanding of where our civilizations are headed. We are wrapping up our…
Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy
When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups…
Empire of the Sum – 99% Invisible
Whether or not you’re a fan of math, we’ve always had a need to count things. Maybe it’s to figure out the maximum weight an airplane can safely hold, or…
Subtitle -A German-speaking outpost in the American Midwest
German used to be one of the most widely-spoken languages in the United States. A survey in 1900 listed 613 US-based German-language newspapers. Today, only a handful survive, and German…
The Six-Week Cure – 99% Invisible
In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada — not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages. The city became known as the “Divorce…
George Orwell’s forgotten wife
George Orwell – the author of classics like 1984 – is a household name. But have you heard of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who convinced her husband to write…
The Pre-Raphaelites: everything you wanted to know
How did the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood become so famous? Did Elizabeth Siddal really almost die in a bathtub when she modelled for John Everett Millais' Ophelia? And which Rosetti painting shocked…
99 Percent Invisible – Episode 561 Long Strange Tape
The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great. But because the cassette was so much cheaper and easier to use…