Bookmarked
“Plurality” is a new book by Audrey Tang, who served as the digital minister of Taiwan from 2022 to 2024. She received international acclaim for her digital democracy initiatives, which used open data platforms to empower civil society and foster public engagement in policy-making. E. Glen Weyl, an economist at Microsoft, and more than 100 online collaborators co-authored 'Plurality' to share Tang's vision and ideas of a future where technology uplifts people rather than dividing them.
Read also Time Magazine’s recent profile on Tang:
The book Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microuniverse by synthetic biologist Tal Danino features the microbial world in astonishing, colorful close-ups.
Author Tal Danino
“Token Supremacy: The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022” by New York Times reporter Zachary Small explores how the art world bought into the NFT hype and what happened when the billion-dollar-bubble burst.
Read an excerpt of the book here:
Zachary Small
Digital Society
Calling Out Cancel Culture
In her column, “Everyone’s so intolerant online. Am I right to stay silent?” author Elle Hunt shares her experience with intense backlash on social media after debating the seemingly innocent question of whether the movie Alien qualifies as a horror movie. Her take: “Alien’s not a horror film.” What initially sparked as a pub debate among friends escalated into online outrage when the author posted a poll on X, receiving hundreds of hateful responses.
“Online, people held me up as an example of everything wrong with journalism, scouring my work for further evidence of my idiocy, and CCing my editors to demand I be fired (I’m self-employed – but believe me, at that moment, I’d have fired myself if I could).
