Podcast: The Life Changing Power of Lifting

For this week’s podcast, I’m talking to our friend Casey Johnston, a tech journalist turned fitness journalist turned independent journalist. Casey studied physics, which led her to tech journalism; she did some of my favorite coverage of Internet culture as well as Apple’s horrendous butterfly laptop keyboards. We worked together at VICE, where Casey was…

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‘My Bad:’ Babyface Vance Meme Creator On Norwegian Tourist’s Detainment

On one side of the world, a very online guy edits a photo of then-Vice President Nominee JD Vance with comically-huge and perfectly round chipmunk cheeks: a butterfly flaps its wings. A year later, elsewhere on the planet, a Norwegian tourist returns home, rejected from entry to the U.S. because—he claims—border patrol agents found that…

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Airline-Owned Data Broker Selling Your Flight Info to DHS Finally Registers as a Data Broker

The Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), a data broker owned by the country’s major airlines which sells travellers’ detailed flight records in bulk to the government, only just registered as a data broker with the state of California, which is a legal requirement, despite selling such data for years, according to records maintained by the California…

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This Queer Online Zine Can Only Be Read Via an Ancient Internet Protocol

Unless you’re living in a ChatGPT hype-bro bubble, it’s a pretty common sentiment these days that the internet is getting shittier. Social media algorithms have broken our brains, AI slop flows freely through Google search results like raw sewage, and tech companies keep telling us that this new status quo is not only inevitable, but…

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Here’s the Video for Our Sixth FOIA Forum: Massive Blue

The FOIA Forum is a livestreamed event for paying subscribers where we talk about how to file public records requests and answer questions. If you’re not already signed up, please consider doing so here.  Recently we had a FOIA Forum where we focused on our article This ‘College Protester’ Isn’t Real. It’s an AI-Powered Undercover Bot…

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