First Derivative [27]
When Transgender Trumps Treachery
we live in a police/military/intel state ♀️ we need to dismantle it before it destroys us all #WeGotThis https://t.co/dcxdO6ggNn — Chelsea E. Manning (@xychelsea) Aug. 20, 2017…
Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant
In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in late June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a tech giant that shapes public policy debates…
Last week was the week the proverbial worm turned. It was the week President Trump finally went too far for all those people for whom he had not previously gone too far. People resigned from the president's various consultative committees so fast…
How Do You Make a TV Show Set in the West Bank?
In 1949, Yizhar Smilansky, a young Israeli veteran, national legislator, and novelist writing under the pen name S. Yizhar, published “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novella about the destruction of a lightly fictionalized Palestinian village…
How YouTube perfected the feed
Sometime late last year, as I was playing a video game named Dishonored 2, I did a routine YouTube search about how to beat a tricky section of the game. As usual, I found a video to answer my question. But on my next YouTube visit, the site…
Gilead-Kite: A Breakthrough. A $12 Billion Deal. Another Expensive Drug
Gilead Sciences, the leading maker of drugs for HIV and hepatitis C, made an expensive and gutsy move into the cutting edge of cancer treatment this morning, spending $11.9 billion in cash to buy Kite Pharma, the developer of a treatment that…
Has disruption from e-commerce run its course?
Despite the cascade of store closings, liquidations and bankruptcies, there are strong indications that pure-ecommerce, not stores, may be the endangered model. Consider Alibaba's Hema grocery store concept, which the company has been quietly…
Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn't Like-I Know Because It Happened to Me
Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture
In 2013, Peter Hollens was an aspiring a cappella singer surviving, in his words, by living on ramen in someone else's house. Hollens was hardly new to the music business; he'd been a record producer and cruise singer before striking out on his…
We're Failing Our Test Run for the Age of CRISPR
A few weeks ago, two stories crossed paths. In MIT Technology Review, we learned that, for the first time in the United States, researchers had used the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR to modify a human embryo. Several days later, CBS News…