Design:
A history of athleisure, from early rubber-soled tennis shoes to contemporary yoga pants.
Publishers are hoping that a one-handed book design (with a reading structure more akin to scrolling) can boost book sales, particularly among younger readers.
Body/Image:
Rob Horning analyzes how the synthesized, digital-being 'influencer' Lil' Miquela connects with questions of race, immigration, the American Dream of reinvention, and the erasure that comes with it: "...Miquela is a visual expression of an algorithmic sublime, a representation of the possibility that the history of racialization can be reversed not through struggle but through the administration of statistically driven processes that can eliminate the way any bodies have been marked socially and historically."
Given that humans are by and large such visually-oriented creatures, what does it mean for our collective ability to reckon with reality when synthesized "deep fakes" are growing both more common and more compelling in their purported authenticity? In part, the dramatic increase in the fidelity of digital fakes is due to the increase in data throughput that graphics processors are capable of, compared to their now primitive-seeming counterparts. The dangerous potential of easy, convincing fakes has more than just political talk show pundits rattled: DARPA launched a program in 2016 to keep tabs on how quickly evolving techniques could pose a risk to security interests, or be used to foment aggression in response to acts that in reality, never occurred.
Energy:
A lack of proper charging infrastructure, and the immense cost involved in building it, is slowing the adoption of electric cars globally. As with other utopian projects, inserting a new technology, even if transformative, is not enough to fundamentally change the system it lives within—many incremental steps to shift constraints oblique and adjacent, are also necessary.
Reports vary, but by almost any measure, the wild success of cryptocurrencies have had a worrisome impact on emissions, due to the dirty power inputs behind the electricity the "mining" activity requires. A new report claims that literal mining of valuable metals like gold and silver is less environmentally damaging (at least from an emissions standpoint) than the average cryptocurrency rig is, on a dollar-to-dollar basis.