A chatbot engineer describes what it’s like to design AI to simulate a dead friend, then see it interact with the friend’s extended family. / Bloomberg Lottie Howard and “Country” Bill White were “buried alive” practitioners in the ’60s. They were married, buried, then disinterred for the honeymoon. Two
A company told a black woman she couldn’t wear dreadlocks. She alleged racial discrimination. And while the court said dreadlocks weren’t an “immutable” characteristic of black racial identity, it remained reluctant to define race itself. / NPR Andrew WK is actually Dave Grohl, Stevie Wonder can really see, Jack
“When Terrence M. Cunningham, the chief of police in Wellesley, Mass., and president of America’s largest police management organization, issued a formal apology earlier this week to the nation’s minority population ‘for the actions of the past and the role that our profession has played in society’s
Who votes the most? “The most reliable voters in the U.S. right now, who are getting to the polls at a higher rate than any other, aren’t white men (angry or not) or soccer moms (translation: suburban white women). An astounding 82 percent of African American women over
The private prison industry is mobilizing its clout and money to dodge the DOJ’s decree to end use of private prisons. / The Washington Post Native Americans are killed by police at higher rates than any other group in America, and yet they are often overlooked or misidentified by the
Kaleidoscopic, nutso BBC doc challenges the algorithmization of media and the fantasies it has convinced us are real. “We have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we accept it as normal.” / BBC If online identities allow us
Government scientists discover a process for converting CO2 into ethanol at room temperature, opening possibilities for converting exhaust into fuel and capturing pollution at the same time. / popularmechanics.com Data beamed back from NASA’s New Horizons probe suggests that Pluto could have some weather-like behavior, including clouds. / The
Updates on the push to retake Mosul from the Islamic State. / The Guardian Selling nothing but bonhomie, Canada decided we need some cheering up right now (what with this terrible election) and came together in a video to tell us why we’re loved. / Politico Nicholas Kristof puts Clinton in
The Obama administration and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, under pressure from Clinton-connected airline lobbyists and Rahm Emanuel, failed despite efforts to block the US Airways-American airline merger—which has enriched executives and hiked prices for consumers. / ProPublica Fiber and beans might make you fart more, but
Infographic: Every spell cast in the Harry Potter books, mapped by word position. / public.tableau.com The ACLU won court support for its rebuke of Baltimore police’s method of tracking #BlackLivesMatter protesters by deploying facial recognition technology to social media feeds. Facebook and Twitter promptly abrogated the services that
