Can prejudice be justified by personal preference, or is this just a matter of politically incorrect taste?

To find out, I went straight to the source – horny, possibly racist guys of all ethnic backgrounds – to tease them into showing their true colors. I spent a week on Grindr, trying my hardest to come off completely racist. Whenever I received a message, I’d introduce myself with a “looking for friends or looking to fuck?”

The results are somewhat comical, but the comments section is pretty revealing too. Most of the commenters argue that having a racial preference in sex or dating is the same as liking tall guys or hairy guys. There does seem to be a level of acceptance of racially based dating parameters, an unnerving tendency of the commenters (and perhaps parts of the gay community broadly) to equate excluding people of certain races — or, on the exact opposite pole, racial fetishes and objectification — as par for the course.

Not only are the people who start these trends more tightly clustered on the network, they’re also using the network differently. Most people on Twitter have fewer followers than the number of people they’re following—that is, they’re following celebrities, journalists, news organizations, and other big institutions that aren’t following them back. But according to Meeder, the users who initiate blacktags seem to have more reciprocal relationships—they’re following everyone who follows them. Tigress_Lee, the user who helped spark #wordsthatleadtotrouble, has 1,825 followers, and she’s following 1,873. BigJamaal has 11,962 followers, and he’s following 11,203. These patterns suggest that the black people who start these tags “are using Twitter as a social tool,” Meeder says. “They’re using Twitter like a public instant messenger”—using the service to talk to one another rather than broadcast a message to the world.

Young black people are good at starting trends? Tell me something I don’t know. Still, it’s excellent to see some semi-serious attention paid to how different communitites are shaping and being shaped by emerging technologies.

In other words, Apple will know who you are, where you are, and what you are doing and saying and even how fast your heart is beating. In some embodiments of Apple’s “invention,” this information “can be gathered every time the electronic device is turned on, unlocked, or used.” When an “unauthorized use” is detected, Apple can contact a “responsible party.” A “responsible party” may be the device’s owner, it may also be “proper authorities or the police.”

Is there an exact point at which a company becomes so large and powerful that it inevitably goes all 1984 on us? If we could calculate that figure, I’d be all for revoking corporate charters when they reach that evil tipping point.

“We need to change the driving culture where some drivers don’t pay attention to the rights of bicyclists,” Villaraigosa said.

The mayor touted the city’s bicycle plan, which calls for the creation of more than 1,600 miles of “bikeways” throughout the city. Ten percent of revenue from Measure R, the voter-approved half-cent sales tax for transportation projects in L.A. will be allocated toward bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, according to the mayor.

The mayor noted that between 1977 and 2010, the city only built 372 miles of bikeways, with an average of eight to ten miles being built per year. He hopes to increase the average to forty miles per year, with 200 miles planned for the next five years.

I’m not terribly fond of bike helmets (although I’ve decided to try to start wearing one). Aside from the tired Libertarian framing of the personal choice issues involved in public safety, the Times reported that as bicycle helmet use expanded rapidly in the 1990s, the rate of head injuries among cyclists increased 51%. One possible solution might be that cyclists must ride aggressively and skillfully to ensure their own safety, an activity that is neither supported nor defeated by helmet use. Focuing on the helmet rather than on bicycle safety confuses one potential part of safety (the head gear) for the whole (a comprehensive orientation of cyclists and motorists toward safety).

The list of New York artists who died of AIDS over the last 30 years is countless, and the loss immeasurable.
Last Address uses images of the exteriors of the houses, apartment buildings, and lofts where these and others were living at the time of their deaths to mark the disappearance of a generation. The film is a remembrance of that loss, as well as an evocation of the continued presence of these artists work in our lives and culture.

Last Address from Ira Sachs on Vimeo.

One example: History as a Weapon, a collective of sorts that hosts on its site a copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: the authors claim to have scanned the book from a physical original. Out of love and respect for the work (and possibly with Zinn’s verbal agreement), the editors of the site have made available the entire text online for free. They reject profit sharing from sales of the book and have resisted legal pressure from the publisher of the work to take down the offending pages. They also reject the idea that their site harms sales of the book. Again, the site is manned by volunteer Zinn fans and doesn’t sell anything.

We love A People’s History of the United States and we love Howard Zinn. We think it possesses something few books ever contain: the potential to re-wire how people think of their government, their history, their relationship to democracy, and their own political agency. And from many conversations and emails, this potential continues to be realized over and over again, every day. Before it, the stories of coal miners resisting and slaves rebelling were relegated to folk songs or hidden away in some history classes taught in some places. Now a people’s history can be found everywhere, from online to #169 on Amazon. We want it get out there even more and that’s why we put it up and have promoted it so much. We want people to read the book.

Certainly we should pay authors for their work and allow writers and artists to have say in how their work is used, but the ability of corporate interest to dictate to Zinn readers how they should enjoy the text is unthinkable. The book is over 30 years old and has been a best-seller for decades. To think that a corporation has the right to shut down free expression out of a a vague fear that it could possible be making more money off of a deceased author’s work is terribly dispiriting.