The Doctor

When I was a child, I had my mind warped by Buck Rogers Stuff that told me we’d land a man on the moon, have small cheap machines that could do arithmetic better and faster than we could, and, perhaps least plausibly, have a president of the United States who was known to have African ancestors. On Martin Luther King Day, Mike Glyer looks at civil rights as a natural part of sf.

Twitter-pated

Charlie Stross says that the social networks are a form of telepathy, and it’s dystopian. (“Twitter and Facebook et al are fine-tuned to turn us all into car-crash rubberneckers and public execution spectators.”) The other day Neil Gaiman said that if you want to be a writer, you NEED to go to a Clarion workshop, and the Twitterverse, shocked by a Tweet that was not nuanced and carefully qualified, was plunged into war. And here’s someone who got out.


ETA: On the other hand…

ETA: What I should have said is that Twitter encourages people to talk in blurbs, and it is reasonable to reply to such blurbs with reasoned discussion of why the blurbs are gross oversimplifications. Thank you, mrissa

Inscrutable Occidentals

Alleged Chinese view of the Republican debate

Thanx to andrewducker

Bayard Rustin

The gay man Martin Luther King loved and trusted