I’m generally a fan of Doctorow’s writing—his recent collection of novellas (“Radicalized”) is one of my favorites and I also own his entire “Little Brother” trilogy. This collection of stories just didn’t land for me, though, and there are other stories/books of his that felt the same.

I wonder if his weirder, more optimistic stories don’t work for me in the same way his bleak ones do. This collection dates to 2007, and while Doctorow has long been a critic of certain uses of technology, there are some stories in here that seem like they have more faith in the future of tech than I think is warranted in a post-Snowden, post-Cambridge Analytica world.

This was a bit of a slog sometimes—one of the reasons why it took me so long to read and why it didn’t get a full five hearts—but it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.

This is supposedly one of the great classics of Mormon fiction, though I hadn’t heard of it before BCC Press released a free ebook of it a few weeks ago. It is a frank but respectful tale of Mormon pioneers “settling” St. George in the mid-to-late 19th century. It is unflinching in its discussion of the difficulties of polygamy and the abuse of ecclesiastical leadership, but it is also reverent in its treatment of the pioneers’ commitments and beliefs.

Oh good, our fears about deepfakes are coming true.

Intellectual property is a social justice issue.

Latest guest post on official blog of far right Gab platform could have been a Latter-day Saint General Conference sermon. Sure, rejecting truth and embracing evil sounds bad, but there are a lot of assumptions that need to be surfaced and interrogated about what both terms mean.

I do not always have praise for the local Republican supermajority, but I’m glad to see this goes beyond Ukraine to provide support for all kinds of refugees. Tentative optimism here.

Yemen has been on my mind a lot since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but mostly because I’m belatedly realizing I haven’t been paying attention. It’s not that Ukraine doesn’t deserve our attention, it’s that Yemen has long deserved just as much. There, we’re the ones complicit in civilian deaths, and we need to own up to that.

I missed most of this yesterday, but Masnick sums up my thoughts so much better than I could.

I will only accept complaints about gas prices from people who also bemoan our failure to invest in public and alternative transportation.

The Onion speaks uncomfortable truth. Americans must hold Putin accountable, but we meed to turn our attention inward, too.

KONY 2012 has been on my mind a lot lately, and this is a good read. It doesn’t bring up why I’ve had it on the mind, though. I’m afraid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could turn into a sequel of sorts: Something important and meaningful that people glom onto because they see something oversimplified on social media.

Interesting if disconcerting story. The idea of whataboutism as misinformation is particularly disturbing, and it’s important to remember that misinformation is a non-partisan phenomenon (even if the GOP is particularly keen on it). The worst part from a personal angle is how this relates to my own struggling to balance calling out the invasion of Ukraine with knowing that I haven’t been as attentive to other conflicts that deserve my brainspace. I think that’s possible in a way that doesn’t support the Kremlin, but there is some delicate balancing to be done here.

Textbook example of why it is never enough to say you didn’t mean any harm. This is shameful and gross.

On one hand, this is actual social media censorship, not what bad actors in the U.S. complain about. On the other, it is a reminder that even the best intentioned laws against misinformation, etc. could have unintended effects. We need to tread carefully when figuring out legal responses to social media problems.

Lots of thoughts about this. As someone with an education PhD who teaches and researches outside traditionally education topics, I want to emphasize that the prevalence of education PhDs is a symptom, not the actual problem. In my teaching and research outside my home discipline, I work hard to learn the content and communities that I’m branching into. The disdain for those content and communities at BYU Religious Education is the real problem here and therefore what I’m really worried about. To channel Shulman, this is a context that values pedagogical knowledge at the expense of content knowledge; there are lots of academic departments out there that make the opposite mistake, but that doesn’t justify this approach either.

We can support Ukraine generally and still be concerned about the integration of the far-right into their armed forces.

So very gross. What’s happening in Ukraine is terrible, but terrible things are happening all over the world, and we shouldn’t make Ukraine more terrible out of some kind of chauvinism.

Proud of Lexington for hosting this. Also wondering if I should check the Lexington groups on Gab to see if the local far-right is cranky about it.

Tremendously worrying stuff. Taxes are the price we pay for democratic society.

Because the Web feels new to us, it’s easy to forget how important it is to preserve it for the future.

Oh no no no. This hadn’t crossed my mind as a possibility, but how terrible.

Eurovision is not supposed to be political, but it always sneaks in. My money is on a lot of sympathy votes for Ukraine’s entry, and a very low score for Russia.

Lots of important reminders in here. I also feel ashamed that I have not protested my country’s wars in the way these Russians are doing so now.

Greene is repeatedly awful, and the GOP’s refusal to do anything substantial about it is telling.

Hits too close to home for me. I have work to do.