"The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they traveled through the computer. Ships, motorcycles. With the circuits like freeways. I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see. And then, one day… I got in."
— Kevin Flynn
They finally got it right. TRON: Ares is so good and the soundtrack is AWESOME! I was a pre-teen when I watched the original TRON, a 1982 action sci-fi film that was one of the first films from a major studio to use extensive computer graphics. Only 20 minutes of computer animation was used in the first film and mostly in scenes that show digital terrain, or patterns, and vehicles such as light-cycles, tanks and ships. The computers used at the time could not perform animation, so the frames had to be produced one by one. TRON was one of the sparks that led me to major in computer graphics at Pratt Institute a several years later. That BFA program at Pratt was also one of the first.
On March 20th, 2000, during an electrifying live performance at Radio City Music Hall, we were swaying along with the ‘neo-soul’ music performed by D’Angelo & the Soultronics, when suddenly my mind picked up on an entailment that only musicians of their caliber could initiate:
The phrase “free your mind and your ass will follow” (see Parliament-Funkadelic or P-Funk) means that by letting go of the need to conform, creativity and authentic self-expression can flow freely, leading to a more genuine and fulfilling life. Today, I remembered this concert that coincided with the release of Voodoo: it was one of three highly acclaimed albums and each one was a chapter in D’Angelo’s Afro-modernist, Black music manifesto.
HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA — Amerindian communities in northeast North America formed a Confederacy of nations known as the Iroquois League, consisting of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. EPISODE 292 — Iroquois.
The Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Haudenosaunee, was a powerful alliance of five Native American nations in what is now New York and Canada, which functioned as a participatory democracy. Originally consisting of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations, the Tuscarora joined later, making it the "Six Nations". The confederacy was known for its political structure, symbolic "longhouse," and strategic role in resolve regional conflicts, which significantly influenced the development of early American democracy.
"Iroquois (poisonous snakes) is what the French called us; the five/six Nations is what the British called us; Haudenosaunee (we who are building a longhouse) is what we called ourselves."
Beginning tonight, the Media 2070 project will co-host its fifth Black Future Newsstand (BFN) exhibition, with scheduled events running through mid-November.
This latest installment, which is happening in Houston, will once more ask attendees to imagine “what does a media system that loves Black people look and feel like in a future where reparations are real?”
It’s a question that Media 2070 has been asking since its founding in 2020 — and it’s a question we’ve posed to BFN attendees since our very first exhibit in Harlem in 2023.
Media 2070 and the Preserving Essential Cultural Archives & Narratives (PECAN) Project are co-hosting Houston’s BFN, where a front porch will serve as the latest example of a critical information ecosystem that exists in many Black communities.
One trillion! There was no mistaking the number that was center stage at the Internet Archive in San Francisco on October 22. “We are celebrating a major goal of one trillion web pages…shared by people all over the world, wanting to make sure that what they know is passed on,” said Brewster Kahle,...
Character.AI said on Wednesday that it would bar people under 18 from using its chatbots starting late next month, in a sweeping move to address concerns over child safety.
The rule will take effect Nov. 25, the company said. To enforce it, Character.AI said, over the next month the company will identify which users are minors and put time limits on their use of the app. Once the measure begins, those users will not be able to converse with the company’s chatbots.
“We’re making a very bold step to say for teen users, chatbots are not the way for entertainment, but there are much better ways to serve them,” Karandeep Anand, Character.AI’s chief executive, said in an interview. He said the company also planned to establish an A.I. safety lab.
BOSTON – Scientists at the New England Aquarium have unveiled a new list of names for North Atlantic right whales. The annual tradition helps researchers in the field identify the critically endang…
The author is a Senior at Bellevue East High School in Bellevue, Nebraska, and a Director for YEPT. This story is part of The 89 Percent Project , an initiative of the global journalism collaboration with Covering Climate Now .
Fifteen-year-old Chase Parson lies awake sometimes, his mind flitting between worries. He’s not thinking about schoolwork or friendship troubles. He’s ruminating on something much more existential: climate change.
“I think about how scientists predict we only have a matter of years until the damage caused is too great to reverse, how politicians act as if climate change doesn’t even exist, and how random people on the internet create fake news in order to make people believe climate change isn’t real,” Parson said.
Parson isn’t alone in his distress about climate change.
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
In 2014, Malala Yousafzai became the youngest person to win a Nobel Prize, an honor that weighed on her when she went off to college. In Finding My Way, she writes about her life at Oxford and beyond.
The order is to be implemented at school libraries on military bases in Kentucky, Virginia, Italy and Japan. Students and their families claimed their First Amendment rights had been violated when officials removed the books to comply with President Trump's executive orders.
"Let me tell you ‘bout the Let me, let me tell you ‘bout the chicken grease Oh, oh, stuffs and things to make the people get out their seat…"
—D’Angelo
Chicken dishes were popular among enslaved people before the U.S. Civil War, as chickens were generally the only animals these people were allowed to own, as well as being cheap and easy to raise. Although I’m a pescatarian now, I grew up in Kentucky eating fried chicken among many other dishes that are considered to be ‘soul food’ that has roots in the culinary traditions of West Africans who were enslaved and brought to the Americas. The importance of ‘grease’ in Black culture and life should never be
underestimated. Saving the grease was a practice passed down through generations of Black cooks who migrated from the South. The flavorful grease was used to season and enrich a wide array of dishes, from cornbread and greens to fried eggs and potatoes.
"People actually ate while they played. Everything got greasy n loose, including the audience." — YahKnoyah
The colloquial phrase “chicken grease” originated in the 20th century, from a style of guitar playing that feels and sounds slippery as the players’ fingers and slipped and slid over the chords. Chicken grease was in blues music that emerged in the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta in the late 1800s; it followed the second migration of Black Americans from the Deep South and evolved in urban nightclubs. In the early 1970s, hip- hop originated in the inner cities; by the late 20th century, it was sampled and appropriated as a global commodity. This entry follows one particular thread, the specific sound that put late Richmond, Virginia native Michael “D’Angelo” Archer in a circle with other highly influential figures in Black American music. So let’s start at the beginning.
In the past several weeks, I’ve taken my time to understand the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and how the United States responded to it (first by arming the combatants, and then, most helpfully, by bombing Veracruz to try to prevent one party from receiving those same arms shipments, and then failing at that).
I was thinking this was all going to lead up to, “and that’s why the Mexicans started immigrating in significant numbers to the United States in the 1920s,” which in turn led in part to the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924 and the eventual militarization of the border against Mexicans in particular. After all, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez, whose work I’ve discussed before, asserted back in 2022 that “[the] refugee population that arrived in the United States between 1910 and...1920 is the foundation of the growth of the Mexican American population today. So many families across the United States today can trace their origins north of the border to the Mexican Revolution.”[1] I figured there was some sort of “you reap what you sow” type point to be made.
An essay about the impact of the Old World on the New World. This is an essay about how the Dutch settlers changed and influenced the Iroquois through trade.
On the fourth April 1609, the ship de Halve Maen sailed out the port of Amsterdam. The captain, named Henry Hudson (1565-1610), went on an assignment given to him by the Dutch East India Company. Hudson was tasked to find a new shipping route to India. His original plan was to sail through the Artic, but the ice stopped him, so he sailed west. This caused him to arrive at the mouth of the river, which the Dutch called the Noortrivier (Hudson River). Hudson thought that he had found the mouth of river that would lead to Asia. Thus Hudson sailed al the way up the river until he reached current day Albany, here he discovered that the river was a dead end. The river wasn’t a gateway to Asia, but he did however discover rich fertile lands for farming and fur hunting that were easily accessible by boat.[1] In the following decades several traders and farmers would travel to the land next to thisriver. Most of them would settle in or around settlements called New Amsterdam (New York) or Fort Oranje and Beverwyck (present-day Albany). This river bound New World colony was called the New Netherlands and the Dutch owned it between 1609-1664.[2]
In the last few decades, more and more research has been carried out on New Netherlands as a stand-alone subject. Previously, New Netherlands was often dismissed as a failed forerunner of New York. It was also long thought that the Dutch influence was negligible on the development of New York.[3] This idea has recently been discarded by several historians.[4] Some of these historians are Wim Klooster the author of The Dutch in the Americas, 1600-1800[5], in this book he analyzes and describes what the Dutch did in colonial era North-America. Another historian named Russell Shorto wrote The Island at the Center of the World[6] in which he rediscovered the city of New Amsterdam and its diverse inhabitants. These two books are only the tip of the iceberg that’s called New Dutch History and the books and works in this growing iceberg all tell parts of the story of the Dutch colony in North America.
Nevertheless, New Dutch history is often written in the broader context of the Dutch empire and of other European American colonies. Although this way of working puts the Dutch colony in context to the wider world and the Dutch empire, this also leads to the loss of the small aspects in the big overall picture.
So despite the recent works on the New Netherlands, the story of it’s influence on the indigenous peoples is a fragmented story that is spread over several books and articles by different authors. And therefore this essay will tell a part of the larger story about the interaction between the Dutch and the indigenous peoples in the area nowadays known as the state of New York.
If you think human mummies are scary, wait until you meet dinosaur mummies.
Paleontologists have discovered the mummified remains of two duck-billed dinosaurs that belong to the species Edmontosaurus (go Oilers!) annectens, which lived 66 million years ago in what is now Wyoming.
The immaculate preservation of the animals—a 2-year-old juvenile and young adult that was roughly 5 to 8 years old—exposed unprecedented corporeal details, such as intricate polygonal scales, spinal spikes, fleshy contours, skin wrinkles, and the first hooves ever identified in a dinosaur (or any reptile), making them the oldest hooves in the fossil record.
The lawsuit alleges that the termination of an entire congressionally mandated grant program under the Digital Equity Act is an unconstitutional overreach and strikes a blow to communities, leaving them cut off from basic online necessities.
The Physical Archive in Richmond, California, turned into a festive venue October 21, welcoming the public to one of the places where millions of donated items are preserved. Nearly 350 people filled the Physical Archive to see the collection and learn how the organization processes donated...
Hillsborough County had the second highest number of books removed from library shelves among school districts in the U.S. over the last year, according to PEN America's annual "Banned in the USA" report.
Why it matters: The county's ranking comes months after Hillsborough Superintendent Van Ayres faced intense pressure to remove books deemed by the state inappropriate for students.
Driving the news: Florida again led the nation in book removals, with 2,304 titles pulled from shelves during the 2024-2025 school year.
Major scientific journals and conferences ban crediting an artificial intelligence (AI) program, such as ChatGPT, as an author or reviewer of a study. Computers can’t be held accountable, the thinking goes. But yesterday, a norm-breaking meeting turned that taboo on its head: All 48 papers presented, covering topics ranging from designer proteins to mental health, were required to list an AI as the lead author and be scrutinized by AIs acting as reviewers.
The virtual meeting, Agents4Science, was billed as the first to explore a theme that only a year ago might have seemed like science fiction: Can AIs take the lead in developing useful hypotheses, design and run relevant computations to test them, and write a paper summarizing the results? And can large language models, the type of AI that powers ChatGPT, then effectively vet the work?
The danger of the elite’s obsession with its own stories and circumstances.
Yoni Appelbaum’s grandfather was a mailman. Appelbaum shared this fact with me in Charlottesville last week, onstage at a “Democracy360” event hosted by the University of Virginia and cosponsored by The Atlantic, where he is an editor. We were there to talk about “building the American dream” and, by Appelbaum’s account, being a mailman was once a way to do that. “He was proud of that job. And it was enough, together with my grandmother’s job, that they could buy a row house in Canarsie and raise a family.”
That was not, however, the point of the story. Rather, Appelbaum wanted to emphasize that his grandfather:
In 2015, I settled in at the Springfield, Massachusetts, headquarters of Merriam-Webster, America’s most storied dictionary company. My project was to document the ambitious reinvention of a classic, and I hoped to get some definitions of my own into the lexicon along the way. (A favorite early drafting effort, which I couldn’t believe wasn’t already included, was dogpile : “a celebration in which participants dive on top of each other immediately after a victory.”) Merriam-Webster’s overhaul of its signature work, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged—a 465,000-word, 2,700-page, 13.5-pound doorstop published in 1961 and never before updated—was already in full swing. The revision, which would be not a hardback book but an online-only edition, requiring a subscription, was expected to take decades.
Not long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Pageviews were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company’s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google’s algorithms had punished Merriam’s search results. The company had always been lean and profitable, but the financial hit was real. Merriam’s parent, Encyclopedia Britannica, was facing challenges of its own—who needed an encyclopedia in a Wikipedia world?—and ordered cuts. Merriam laid off more than a dozen staffers. Its longtime publisher, John Morse, was forced into early retirement. The revision of Merriam’s unabridged masterpiece was abandoned.
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