With the holidays just around the corner, Emily and I decided to learn a little but more about washing machines Scientology. Out exploits are published in full this month in F Newsmagazine.
I’m waiting for it to be put up on the web and when it is, I’ll reprint it here.
I have a review of Rebecca Solnit’s talk at the Chicago Humanities Festival coming, but in the mean time: What is happening in New York at Occupy Wall St???
Protesters were removed from Zuccotti Park this morning, and the OWS camp completely disassembled and the park cleaned.
Most concerning, personally, is that transportation was cut off and that members of the press were barred from capturing the events, some even physically assaulted. As a fellow journalist, this is deeply disturbing.
Here’s some links on what went down. I understand the whole “it’s our neighborhood and we’re tired to dealing with all these protesters in our front yard”, but I believe that ultimately it’s about the visibility of an underrepresented contingent, and that if you/we are tired of seeing them, then we are, by extension, tired of dealing with the issues they’re arguing against. Therefore, if you are tired of seeing people occupying your front yard, New Yorkers, then you should be tired of conspicuous Wall St greed, homelessness, high-unemployment rates, the absence of affordable healthcare, high loan rates for students, etc.
The Gothamist: The NYPD Didn’t Want You to See Occupy Wall St Get Evicted
Posted in The Future is NOW
L'Absinthe, Degas
Written by Georges Negri and Emily Vélox Originally published in F Newsmagazine, November 2011.
The facts are rather unreliable; I know that I went to sleep in New York City, maybe Brooklyn, and woke up in downtown Chicago. I had been traipsing around Manhattan, getting a feel for a city that once was so familiar, not set alight with a foreign spirit neither of us really understands. And then the city, the phantom, the fire was all gone. Continue reading
The Guardian published A History of the Internet (in 2009) to celebrate 40 years since the development of Arpanet, and frankly it’s pretty cool. Did you know that Queen Elizabeth II was the first Head of State to send an email (1976) or that the first online “bulletin board” was developed during a particularly bad snow storm in Chicago (1978). Did Al Gore really “invent the internet?” All this gets covered in a beautiful and simple to read interactive timeline. Continue reading
I’ve been readjusting my life in the past few weeks after a busy August, so this site has been on the back-burner. However, I got an email recently that jolted me back into active writing. It’s the case of Oleg Mavromatti. I got the following email from his wife Boryanna Rossa who is trying to raise awareness of Oleg’s case and advocate for political amnesty: Continue reading
There’s an article in today’s New York Times which reminds me of one of the most important Post-Luddite issues. I’m not going to touch on it at length here — I think it merits a much stronger, longer essay than I will post here. I simply want to get the conversation going.
The article “For Data, Tug grows over Security v. Privacy” covers Blackberry’s (RIM Technologies) recent discussions with the United Arab Emirates and other countries which have requested access to Blackberry’s servers in order to monitor criminal or terrorist activity, at risk of having the service cut off within some countries altogether. Obviously many of us send text messages we’d rather no one ever read and the idea of having some government internet security department reading all our texts and instant messages is mortifying. But, I’ll argue, we have given up much of our privacy already — so why is this so concerning? Continue reading
