George Washington University Law Professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson might have a highfalutin-sounding name, but he knows how to speak – and write – in plain English. In his latest book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You, he admonishes, “The only way to truly avoid giving the government open access to our home’s data is to avoid producing it in…
Beach Reads: All Good, All Free
Time to clock out for a while! For my 10th annual beach reads edition, I’m featuring the best of what I’ve checked out of the library in recent months. Thank you, Ben Franklin for starting the nation’s first in my hometown (named for him). Get a free card and walk out with books for zilch, nada, nothing. And so many…
Self-Care as Big Business
Travel back in your mind to the late 90’s, when perhaps the most complicated question on people’s minds – other than why does AOL keep mailing us all these discs? – was “who moved my cheese?” We’re talking peak self-help era when someone named Spencer Johnson could sell tens of millions of copies of a parable posing that inane question.…
How to Fix a Digital Cesspool
God bless Cory Doctorow. A prolific writer with dozens of books to his credit, he is whip smart and hell bent on fixing all that ails the internet. Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022, defining it as deliberately worsening a service out of – what else? – pure greed. The focus here is on apps and in Enshittification we’re…
Phones and Laptops and EVs, Oh My
Mtoto wa nyoka ni nyoka – “The child of a snake is a snake” This Swahili proverb is quoted by one of the indelible subjects we meet in Siddharth Kara’s gut-punch of investigative journalism, Cobalt Red. The full-time guardian for her three grandchildren, at 69 Lubuya is the oldest person Kara interviewed on his many sojourns to the Democratic Republic…