This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for March, 2022. This was an intense month, so a shorter list than usual.

Streaming Media

Severance. My kind of science fiction: darkly satirical, with a dramatic vice that closes with each new episode. Really beautifully done.

Notable Articles

Business

Epic Games Acquires Bandcamp as 'Fortnite' Maker Expands Into Music. “Bandcamp will play an “important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more,” the games company said. According to Bandcamp, under its revenue model artists receive net an average of 82% of every sale.” Fascinating!

Equal Pay Day: What can transparency laws do to the gender pay gap? “After years of little progress toward pay equity, more and more states and localities are passing pay transparency laws that eliminate the secrecy around salaries and could be a powerful tool for eliminating the gender pay gap.”

More Employees Are Saying That Tesla’s Factory Is Horrifically Racist. “One single mother said she was excited to work for Tesla but was fired because she made a complaint about Black workers being call the N-word on the assembly line. According to the report originally published in the LA Times, other employees were also called racial slurs and insults and penalized for telling management.”

Climate

In a US first, California will pilot solar-panel canopies over canals. “India already has solar panels over canals, but the mile-long Project Nexus in California’s San Joaquin Valley will be the first of its kind in the US.” Go Turlock!

Crypto

Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets. “We must take strong steps to reduce the risks that digital assets could pose to consumers, investors, and business protections; financial stability and financial system integrity; combating and preventing crime and illicit finance; national security; the ability to exercise human rights; financial inclusion and equity; and climate change and pollution.”

Ukraine Is Selling NFTs to Finance Its Military. “While it might seem like a weird attempt to gin up funds, Ukraine claims to have raised more than $54 million so far through cryptocurrency donations in order to help fund war and relief efforts in the embattled country. So there’s definitely something to be said for jumping on the crypto train to raise money.”

The (Edited) Latecomer's Guide to Crypto. “Here, a group of around fifteen cryptocurrency researchers and critics have done what the New York Times apparently won’t.”

Exxon Mobil reportedly gets in on Bitcoin mining. “Exxon Mobil has begun a pilot program to set up Bitcoin miners at an oil well in North Dakota. The project reportedly runs off 18 million ft³ of natural gas that would otherwise be flared.” Oh, great.

Culture

MC Hammer ‘Will Beat Yo' Ass’—and Other Hard Tales of the MTV-Friendly Rapper. “Serch claims the $50,000 hit was confirmed by fellow Def Jam artist Eric B., and was supposed to be carried out by the Los Angeles crips. In a later interview, Serch said fear and anger over the incident has never left him.”

Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” Adjusted for Late-Stage Capitalism . “Working 8 to 6, but they call you after hours / Barely gettin’ by, lots of crying in the shower / You might prequalify, won’t even hurt your credit / Ran out of sick days—well, I hope y’all don’t catch it”

Grimes Reveals Y, Her New Baby Daughter With Elon Musk, in Cover Interview. Come for the secret baby, stay for an interview that makes Grimes seem like a pretty cool person.

The case for induction cooking. “But for all the sexiness of cooking with gas (a concept bolstered by aggressive lobbying and advertising from the natural gas industry), it has been shown to be catastrophic for the environment, emitting potent greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere. Worse, a recent study demonstrated that 75 percent of these emissions occur when the stove is off.” This is mostly about how amazing induction is for cooking - I’m envious.

Notable Sandwiches #20: The British Rail Sandwich. “The British Rail sandwich is not really a sandwich at all, but rather a category of sandwiches—modest constructions of hard-boiled egg, cheese and tomato, pressed luncheon meat, tongue, boiled ham, cucumber, prawns, etc., offered on the trains traversing Britain’s many kilometers of railway, particularly (though not exclusively) during the four-and-a-half decades in which it was operated by the her majesty’s government.” Ah, memories.

Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing. “When Will Smith stormed onto the Oscar stage to strike Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife’s short hair, he did a lot more damage than just to Rock’s face. With a single petulant blow, he advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community.”

Media

Google is releasing an open source harassment filter for journalists . “Harassment Manager also lets users download a standalone report containing abusive messages; this creates a paper trail for their employer or, in the case of illegal content like direct threats, law enforcement. For now, however, there’s not a standalone application that users can download. Instead, developers can freely build apps that incorporate its functionality and services using it will be launched by partners like the Thomson Reuters Foundation.”

Politics

California reparations for slavery descendants only. “After more than six hours of debate Tuesday, California’s reparations task force voted that only Black Californians who can prove a direct lineage to enslaved ancestors will be eligible for the statewide — and first-in-the nation — initiative to address the harms and enduring legacy of slavery.” Progress.

Science

Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank. “Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two daily alcohol units, and become stronger as alcohol intake increases.” Drinking any amount of alcohol shrinks your brain.

Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery. “An international security conference explored how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons. A thought experiment evolved into a computational proof.” Nightmare fuel.

Crows possess higher intelligence long thought primarily human. “Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.”

Society

How COVID pressure led single moms to turn to coliving with other adults. “The move to cohabitation eased a significant amount of pressure for Villagomez-Morales at a time when parents, but especially single parents, were being squeezed on all sides — by child care, loss of work and extreme burnout. That, mixed with a housing market that has become increasingly inhospitable to low-wage people, and especially moms, has more single parents looking into the benefits of cohabitation to ride out the pandemic.”

After George Floyd’s murder, police built a secretive surveillance machine that lives on. “We found evidence of a complex engine of surveillance tailor-made for keeping close tabs on protesters and sharing that information among local and federal agencies, regardless of whether the subjects were suspected of any wrongdoing.”

Tatiana Perebyinis and two children identified as those seen dead in viral Lynsey Addario photo from Ukraine. “Photos flashing on his Twitter feed showed four people lying next to a World War II memorial just outside Kyiv after they were fired on by the Russian military. One of them was his wife, and two were his children.” Pure horror.

Mark and Lily Osler: Governor’s order on transgender youth cruel, short-sighted. “Because Gov. Abbott has moved to threaten transgender kids by criminalizing the kind of support they need, it’s time for Lily and me to tell this part of our family story and to address the harm Gov. Abbott is doing.”

In most states, over half of all women of color earn less than a living wage. “In nine states, 50 percent or more of all women workers are earning less than $15 an hour. But in 40 states, 50 percent or more of all women of color — Black women, Latinas, Native American women and Asian American and Pacific Islander women — are earning below a living wage. In 23 states, 60 percent or more of all women of color have hourly earnings under $15.”

What Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination means to Black women. “At the start of this week’s hearing, The 19th spoke to people who gathered on the steps of the high court about what her historic journey to the most powerful bench in the United States means.”

These Companies Are Clamoring for Women's Dollars As They Help Tank Pro-Women Legislation. “Companies clamoring for women’s dollars are making huge donations to politicians and political action committees specifically designed to tank legislation aiming to lift women and families out of poverty, according to new research obtained by Jezebel.”

Technology

Twitter Wants to Reinvent Itself, by Merging the Old With the New. “Now, over a decade later, Twitter is reversing course. The company is pursuing the sort of decentralization Mr. [Blaine] Cook championed. It is funding an independent effort to build a so-called open protocol for social media. It is also weaving cryptocurrency into its app, and opening up to developers who want to build custom features for Twitter.” Quite a lovely piece about decentralization.

The web is for everyone: Our vision for the evolution of the web. “We believe to make the web a better place we need to focus our work on these nine areas.” From Mozilla.

EU's Digital Markets Act will require Apple to open iMessage. “European regulators on Thursday revealed their plan to rein in the anti-competitive practices of Big Tech and fundamentally remake how some of the world’s most powerful companies do business. The rules, which target tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google, are far-reaching and would have huge ramification for those companies’ software and services.” Good.

Is tech still failing Black communities? Data says yes. “There was just a 1% increase in representation of Black workers in technical roles at large tech companies between the years of 2014 and 2021, according to the report titled State of Tech Diversity: The Black Tech Ecosystem.”

Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok. “In October, Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news, touting a local news report on the alleged challenge in Hawaii. In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok.”