Stuff that doesn't really fit in this site's "technology, media, and democracy" remit but is here anyway.
It’s Oscars day! I haven’t seen very many of the nominees this year, but of the ones I have, I need to make this recommendation: Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, nominated for best documentary picture, is brilliant. It’s an under-told part of American history, still highly
Hint: if a party is heavily supported by people who throw Nazi salutes, it might not be up to much good. Some voters for new right-wing parties are economically worried, but blame their issues on the influx of immigrants rather than the increasing divides between rich and poor that we&
For the avoidance of doubt: All empires are bad. All empires have always been bad. All empires always will be bad. The concept of empire is bad. The prerequisites for empire are bad. And the people who like empires — any of them — are bad. Do not have fondness for empires.
I was privileged to be interviewed for this week’s People and Blogs: Hi! I’m Ben Werdmuller. I was born in the Netherlands, grew up and spent my twenties in the UK, and spent twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I live in Greater Philadelphia in
Inspired by Gina Trapani, Buster Benson, and others, I started to build my own Life in Weeks page from scratch. It looks pretty cool, and it’s interesting to see my life milestones presented on this scale. But I’m not going to share it with you. As I was
It’s a small thing, but I broke my Apple Fitness longest streak this week. That means my consecutive number of days that I’ve hit my fitness goals on my Apple Watch has been longer than it’s ever been. Here’s why that’s meaningful: my previous longest
From time to time, people ask me if they can use the content of my posts in another venue or another format. To make that possible, today I released all the text of all my posts under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You’ll see that declaration
For a while now, I’ve been syndicating my posts to MSN. You can see Werd I/O’s profile over there. In some ways, this is my normiest network: whereas my Mastodon community is more technical, my Bluesky community is more political and my newsletter subscribers tend to be
Imagine being so genuinely empty as a human being that you support a regime that conducts mass deportations and runs concentration camps because they support Bitcoin. Imagine watching the rights, freedoms, and safety of trans people being torn down over the course of 72 hours and thinking, man, I'
The last time this man was in power we wound up with one of the largest civil rights movements ever conducted in the United States. There is so much light; so much bravery; so much fairness and equity and rebellion in so many. Those are the people I believe in.
If ever there was a litmus test about who to avoid, it’s the people who see the language of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 21st Century and think, “oh, that’s problematic”. Here is the full text: SECTION 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be
I realized some time ago that all the ways I want America to change just bring it closer to being Europe. Like, what if we had this can-do attitude and all the good parts without the guns and with universal healthcare, real education, unprocessed food without sugar in it, a