There are many things that big internet companies do that the media have made out to be scandals that aren't -- but one misuse of data that I think received too little attention was how both Facebook and later Twitter were caught using the phone...

Steven Bochco may be famous for his TV writing and producing career, but a little known fact about the strong-willed Hollywood figure is that he fired one of his star actors whose 'morning dump' made him late to set every day. Bochco, who passed away in April earlier this year, recounted the feces-related firing in his book Truth Is a Total Defense: My Fifty Years in Television. In his book he detailed how he gave actor Daniel Benzali the boot while he was the lead in the hit drama Murder One which aired from 1995 to 1997, after he allegedly blamed his tardiness on his morning bathroom routine.

THE LEADERSHIP OF the UMass Amherst College Democrats began discussing an operation they believed could sink the campaign of Alex Morse for Congress as far back as last October, a plan they then helped engineer and which came to fruition on Friday, after the College Democrats sent a letter regarding Morse to the Daily Collegian, the school’s student newspaper. The letter, sent three weeks before his primary challenge to Rep. Richard Neal, informed Morse that he was no longer welcome at College Democratic events, alleging he used such opportunities to socialize with students and later connect with them on social media in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. Message logs obtained by the Intercept — both from leaders of the College Democrats UMass Amherst chapter group as well as chats one of them had with Morse — shed new light on how this purported scandal was deployed. As a condition of obtaining the logs, The Intercept agreed to publish some of the chats and paraphrase others.

Why is Trump’s son-in-law meeting with “presidential candidate” Kanye West instead of bringing peace to the Mideast and saving America from the coronavirus?

Last week, The Satanic Temple (TST) introduced “the Satanic Abortion Ritual”—a ritual designed to provide religious support and comfort for women who’ve decided to get an abortion. But the ritual has legal consequences as we all spiritual ones: TST claims that if abortion is incorporated into a religious ritual, then states with Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) laws must provide abortion on demand for Satanic women. Mandatory waiting periods or requirements such as reading anti-abortion literature, listening to fetal heartbeats, or viewing sonograms would violate the religious freedom of Satanic women by disrupting their sacred ritual. As Jane Essex, Spokesperson for TST’s Religious Reproductive Rights Campaign puts it, “It would be unconstitutional to require a waiting period before receiving holy communion. It would be illegal to demand Muslims seek counseling prior to Ramadan.” Is TST sincere about sacralizing abortion or is this just a canny legal stratagem? And could this actually corner states with RFRA laws into granting abortion on demand?

A few years back, an innocent Facebook post asked, "Was there ever such a thing as a San Francisco accent?" A long, long debate ensued. Many claimed that it absolutely does (or did) and originated in the old working-class "South of the Slot" neighborhood (now SoMa) and sounded a little like "the Bronx with a twist," others were adamant that the fabled San Francisco accent just doesn't exist. Some 1,200 comments later and everyone was still confused.

It should be no surprise Kamala Harris has been chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate. From her career-long pursuit of right-wing goals to her flexibility with the truth, the two are remarkably similar politicians.

One of the nation's worst-run Democratic parties has a veto power that should be taken away.

Students who die while attending Boston University will be able to undergo an official process to obtain a posthumous degree, starting this Fall. The University released the policy June 12, but did not make an announcement or notify the BU community otherwise. BU spokesperson Colin Riley said the release of these guidelines is not related to the pandemic. Meetings regarding creation of the policy extends back to January of this year, according to Riley. The University has issued posthumous degrees before, but did not instate an official policy until this summer. “There were proposals to formalize this, sadly, when a student passes away, particularly if they’ve been here years,” Riley said. “It’s unfortunate timing. People may misconstrue.” While the discussion has been ongoing since before the coronavirus upended campus life, the process was lengthy and deliberative until it produced an official result in June. A policy for posthumous degrees has been in development at BU since at least 2013, Riley said.

(Spoilers for Book of the Long Sun) The title is a multiplex pun, so typical of Gene Wolfe. The Book of the Long Sun (1993-6) can only closely follow, or mirror The Book of the New Sun (1980-3). And just as Severian, the narrator of the first Book, is the New Son of God, a man becoming Christlike if not Christ himself returned, so Patera Silk, Wolfe’s new protagonist, is the Long Son, the product of a virgin birth, long (tall) in physical and moral stature. And the renovation of the Sun is again implied; and the story, in four volumes, is very long, and is not over yet. Thus Wolfe in six words summarises his second tetralogy; and the critic can add that The Book of the Long Sun is, very likely, the most significant work of SF to be published in the 1990s – the most precise, the most sustained, and the most profound. It is a tale of physical, religious, and philosophical exodus; and, as such, it interrogates, and dismisses, the material world. The result is devious, eccentric, and charismatic, an old story rendered utterly, weirdly new.

For over a decade I have been working towards my personal goal of being the first Black chef in 150 years to master the cooking traditions of my colonial and Antebellum ancestors. Five trips to six West African nations and more on the way, and having cooked in almost every former slaveholding state beneath the Mason-Dixon line, my work is constant, unrelenting mostly because I have to carve my way through a forest of stereotypes and misunderstandings to bring our heritage to life. I also just want to preserve the roots of our cooking before they’re gone.

The dungeon-master Flintwyrm explains to four adventurers over a voice call that the only way to stop the apocalypse is to play the most intense extreme-metal song imaginable. All they have to do is find a concert venue called The Hall of Cacophonous Screams, an endless keg of beer, and five “minstrels of pain” to frontline their jam session, all the while surviving goblins and the forthcoming apocalypse. Flintwyrm, a 29-year-old named Christopher Joel, is excited about the adventure: this is how he and hundreds of strangers are bonding during quarantine, whether they are role-playing gamers, metalheads, or somewhere in between. Welcome to Mörk Borg, the headbanger of a game that is the latest example of the fertile cross-pollination between tabletop role-playing and extreme metal: a love letter to the hellraising imagery, lyrics, and album art of metal. Tabletop role-playing games are collaborative and narrative, relying on improvisation and cooperation more than strict rules or cards – Dungeons & Dragons is the best-known example. In Mörk Borg, players – gathered online or in person – narrate their journeys through flooded crypts, torture dungeons and dark forts, rolling dice to find the result of almost any encounter, from attacking monsters to scavenging food from a corpse (or, depending how desperate they are, eating the corpse itself). Players’ characters die so frequently that Joel constructed a virtual graveyard to house all the dead, each gravestone engraved with a lighthearted epitaph. “The themes are dark, the setting is dark, but what sets the tone is the players,” he says.

The Mozilla Corporation announced today it was laying off approximately 250 staff members in a move to shore up the organization's financial future. The layoffs were publicly announced in a blog post today. Employees were notified hours before, earlier this morning, via an email [PDF] sent by Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation CEO and Mozilla Foundation Chairwoman. Baker's message cited the organization's need to adapt its finances to a post-COVID-19 world and re-focus the organization on new commercial services. Baker said that after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mozilla attempted to minimize the healthcare crisis' financial impact with "immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands [meetings]." However, Baker said that Mozilla's "pre-COVID plan is no longer workable."

On Tuesday, as Florida set a daily record for covid-19 deaths, Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods prohibited his deputies from wearing masks at work. His order, which also applies to visitors to the sheriff’s office, carves out an exception for officers in some locations, including hospitals, and when dealing with people who are high-risk or suspected of having the novel coronavirus. In an email to the sheriff’s department obtained by the Ocala Star-Banner, Woods disputed the idea that masks are a consensus approach to battling the pandemic. “We can debate and argue all day of why and why not. The fact is, the amount of professionals that give the reason why we should, I can find the exact same amount of professionals that say why we shouldn’t,” Woods wrote in the email.

Sumner Redstone, a media titan and billionaire who, as chairman of Viacom and National Amusements, drew headlines both for his deal-making as well as his turbulent personal life, died on Tuesday. He was 97.

So if it's not rational and it's not a scam, what are people doing when they vote? It's an ethical act. Not in the sense of doing a good deed, but in the sense that by voting people are making a statement about the kind of person they are, the kind of people they are like, the kind of people they are not like, and that this statement is part of becoming that kind of person. It is an ethical act like the choice to be quiet when you see something wrong; by speaking up or sitting down, you define who you have been leading up to that moment and also define your trajectory going forward. If the social scientists are right and our collective preferences have almost no chance of becoming law, and if our votes sway those slim chances none at all, then this is the most significant work that voting does. When you walk away from the ballot box or the mailbox, you have done nothing to sway the result but have done an enormous amount to define your immediate environment, to sour your relationships, to sneer at some, to establish the basis for your interaction with others. Of course, there are always relationships that need souring and people that need sneering at, so it’s not the social cut that matters. It’s that we are stuck having to express these sneers and sours in this artificial environment, pretending that an act of social care is an act of self-government.

John McAfee knows a thing or two about viruses, but not the kind face masks are meant for — so he was apparently arrested in Norway for wearing a thong over his face instead of a proper cover, according to a report. McAfee, 74, the eccentric, eponymous founder of the PC antivirus software giant, took to Twitter on Monday to announce that he had been detained because he refused to don a medically certified mask instead of — or over — the ladies underwear, the Daily Mail reported. “Trivial issue but waiting for high level beaurocrats [sic] to arrive. Slow bastards, as you know,” the British-born crypto baron wrote. “My Coronavirus mask is the problem. I am insisting it is the safest available and I’m refusing to wear anything else — for my health’s sake. Authority!?!?!?!?” he said in another tweet. “Going to have to cancel the Red Scarf Society meeting. I am so sorry. Note to future adventurers: Always joke with you captors. No matter what,” McAfee added, referring to his group. His wife, Janice, then took over his Twitter account and said she’d managed it “until he escapes (usual method), bribes someone (very quick – might be out in a few hours), retains the right lawyer (will be a few days) or becomes warden of the jail, in which case we will have to force him out.”

Ilhan Omar has won her primary, informally securing a hold on Minnesota's historically Democratic-run 5th district, the Associated Press projects. After a high-profile first term in Congress, the freshman representative faced several primary challengers, the most prominent being Antone Melton-Meaux, a first-time political candidate who runs a mediation company. Melton-Meaux ran a campaign "focused on the fifth," telling Minnesota Public Radio's Mark Zdechlik that Omar is, "out of touch with the district and has been focused on her own personal pursuits and celebrity to the detriment of the work that needs to be done." Omar and Melton-Meaux were nearly tied in fundraising totals, both raising just over $4 million — with Omar holding a slight edge. Both candidates were also heavily funded by out of state donors (which made up 91% of Omar's funds and 85% of Melton-Meaux's.)

One of the world's most prominent astronomical observatories has a hole. On Monday, a 3-inch-thick cable at the Arecibo Observatory broke, tearing a gash 100 feet long in the reflector dish of the 20-acre radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The observatory had just reopened after a temporary closure due to Tropical Storm Isaias when the cable, which helped support a metal platform, snapped at about 2:45 a.m. ET. Now the facility is closed again as engineers assess the damage, according to the University of Central Florida, a co-operator of the telescope. It was not immediately clear how the cable broke or whether the damage was related to Isaias.

Amazon Music and the tech giant’s Audible subsidiary plan to offer podcasts from third-party content providers directly on their platforms, significantly expanding their audio offerings and going head-to-head with Apple, Google, Spotify and others major podcast distribution platforms. But first, they’ve got a PR mess to deal with. The company disclosed the plans on Monday in a mass email to podcast content producers, including journalists and media organizations that cover Amazon, declaring that the information about its podcast plans were “confidential” without following the standard practice of first securing their agreement to treat the message as confidential. This information, of course, was promptly tweeted and reported publicly — quickly making it to the home page of Techmeme, the widely followed tech news aggregation site. Then came the real mess. Podcasters who clicked through to submit their shows discovered this clause in the content license agreement that’s a requirement to participate in the program: “Your Content may not (a) include advertising or messages that disparage or are directed against Amazon or any Service; …”