The Christian home-schooler who made ‘parental rights’ (parents' rights) a GOP rallying cry. Michael Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said. The solution: lawsuits alleging that schools’ teachings about gender identity and race are unconstitutional, leading to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or home schooling. (more)

Nadia Eghbal on Idea machines. Tech as a system of values, and not just an industry, is heavily driven by its subcultures and their ideologies. Where do these ideologies come from, and how do they influence what’s accomplished? cf Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress, Theory of Change (more)

E-books are fast becoming tools of corporate surveillance. Three in ten Americans read digital books. Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read and where, including books on sensitive topics, like if you check out a book on self care after an abortion. Worse, tech and publishing corporations are gobbling up data beyond your reading habits—today, there are no federal laws to stop them from surveilling people who read digital books across the entire internet. (more)

see School Vouchers

aka education savings account, but really a kind of school voucher which puts taxpayer/school funds into parents hands to use on non-public schooling.

creator Slack.com, prev prez of Ludi Corp, building of Game Neverending, which instead became FlickR; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield (more)

SPARC Report Urges Action to Address Concerns with ScienceDirect Data Privacy Practices. Today, SPARC released Navigating Risk in Vendor Data Privacy Practices: An Analysis of Elsevier’s ScienceDirect. (more)

'They know us better than we know ourselves': how Amazon tracked my last two years of reading. When I requested my personal information from Amazon this month under California’s new privacy law, I received mostly what I expected: my order history, shipping information and customer support chat logs. But tucked into the dozens of files were also two Excel spreadsheets, more than 20,000 lines each, with titles, time stamps and actions detailing my reading habits on the Kindle app on my iPhone. (more)

The conservative push for “school choice” has had its most successful year ever. For decades, activists on the right have pushed to steer state money toward alternatives to the public school system. (more)

Yes In My BackYard, anti-NIMBY

married name of Nadia Eghbal

tax on energy sources which emit Carbon Dioxide (more)

an oral history (interview) of Mark Mothersbaugh. transcript (more)

Devo (/ˈdiːvoʊ/, originally /diːˈvoʊ/)[7] is an American rock band from Akron, Ohio formed in 1973. Their classic lineup consisted of two sets of brothers, the Mothersbaughs (Mark Mothersbaugh and Bob) and the Casales (Gerald and Bob), along with Alan Myers. The band had a No. 14 Billboard chart hit in 1980 with the single "Whip It", the song that gave the band mainstream popularity. Devo is known for their music and stage shows mingling kitsch science fiction themes, deadpan surrealist humor and mordantly satirical social commentary. Their often discordant pop songs feature unusual synthetic instrumentation and time signatures that have proven influential on subsequent popular music, particularly new wave, industrial, and alternative rock artists. Devo was also a pioneer of the music video, creating clips for the LaserDisc format, with "Whip It" getting heavy airplay in the early days of MTV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devo Attacking humanity's de-evolution.

Mark Allen Mothersbaugh (/ˈmʌðərzbɔː/; born May 18, 1950) is an American musician. He came to prominence in the late 1970s as co-founder, lead singer and keyboardist of the new wave band Devo, whose "Whip It" was a top 20 single in the US in 1980, peaking at No. 14, and which has since maintained a cult following. Mothersbaugh is one of the main composers of Devo's music. In addition to his work with Devo, Mothersbaugh has made music for television series, films and video games via his production company, Mutato Muzika. He composed the music for the 13-year run of the animated series Rugrats and its three related theatrical films. As a solo musician, Mothersbaugh has released four studio albums: Muzik for Insomniaks, Muzik for the Gallery, Joyeux Mutato and The Most Powerful Healing Muzik in the Entire World.

actor (more)

Not memes I created, but those I tend to quote a lot (more)

Competence porn is a term invented by Leverage writer John Rogers and used by a lot of critics since. It's the thrill of watching talented people plan, banter, and work together to solve problems (problem solving). It's not just "characters being good at a thing," particularly if that thing is fighting—otherwise the term would apply to virtually all fiction—but specifically about using cleverness and hard work. Though the term mostly applies to realistic dramas, there's an element of Wish-Fulfillment to it, as characters in a competence porn series rarely have to deal with serious infighting, dead end ideas, and all the other difficulties that affect real life groups. Common genres include Capers, Medical Dramas, the more idealistic Government and Law Procedurals, and harder sci-fi. Guile Hero and The Trickster characters from mythology and legend are antecedents. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CompetencePorn (TV trope) (more)

Clever Commute creates Email List-s for each Commuter Train line (around New York City and Boston Ma) so that people can alert each other to delays.

Richard Dawkins defines a meme as an idea-virus, in a Viral Model (more)