I live in Washington, D.C., where I first came to work as a writer and producer for The Atlantic in 2010 and then covered D.C. transportation for TBD On Foot. These days, I report on state telecom issues for Warren.
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An hour with Natasha Vargas-Cooper, if you dare.
I remember when BuzzFeed was just something I did in college around 2 a.m…. It’s true.
…But the head of BuzzFeed’s data-science department frankly told me that the company has found it to be extremely difficult to make a news item go viral.
On the corners of Baltimore with PBS. I’ve been looking up a lot on this dynamic again since finishing David Simon’s The Corner this weekend, which is an excellent and sad look at one family’s experiences there.
It’s just that kind of week.
The full magazine here.
“A family of four and their robots, 25 years from now…” Scoff if you will but within reach of these fingers now, as I type, is this laptop, a digital music player, and an iPhone. Not quite what L.A. Times Magazine imagined but here we are.
If life is a cosmic fluke, then we’ve already beaten the odds, and our future is undetermined — the galaxy is there for the taking. If we discover that life arises everywhere, we lose a prime suspect in our hunt for the great filter. The more advanced life we find, the worse the implications. If Curiosity spots a vertebrate fossil embedded in Martian rock, it would mean that a Cambrian explosion occurred twice in the same solar system. It would give us reason to suspect that nature is very good at knitting atoms into complex animal life, but very bad at nurturing star-hopping civilisations. It would make it less likely that humans have already slipped through the trap whose jaws keep our skies lifeless. It would be an omen.
Via The Atlantic Wire:
…the madness started when Scott Terry, one of the 23 members of the White Students Union at Towson University in Maryland attending CPAC, raised his hand and suggested the GOP might do better as “Booker T. Washington Republicans” — “united like the hand, but separate like the fingers.” ThinkProgress has some video of the exchange.
When the crowd realized what Terry was suggesting, there were wide-eyed looks around the room, including from me. I was sitting two seats down from him, next to Matthew Heimbach, president of the Towson White Students Union. Heimbach, at right, was wearing a rebel flag shirt, a George Wallace button, and beat-up black boots.
