What if you took Segway's standard self-balancing technology, but you didn't even have to stand on it? That's basically the promise of the new Segway S-Pod, a "vision for the… Read the rest of the article: Segway announces a new egg-shaped hover chair, because why not

Back in December, ProPublica published a fascinating look into the snake-oil industry around Scientific Content Analysis or SCAN, a so-called "law enforcement tool" that purports to help investigators determine whether… Read the rest of the article: This popular police "mindreading" technique is bullshit — but the things that cops say about it are somehow even worse.

I've been a fan of Blindboy Boatclub since I first discovered "Horse Outside," his hit(?) song with the Rubberbandits (and later, by complete happenstance, ended up staying at the same… Read the rest of the article: Irish people have a very strange understanding of "pizza"

A friend of mine recommended that I check out an album called "Zerwee" by Billy Cobb. It's a deliberate Weezer knockoff, and Cobb pulls it off extremely well. So I looked… Read the rest of the article: "Mr. Brightside" but the lyrics are made from Google auto-complete results

This video is apparently from January of 2019, but I saw it on Twitter the other day, accompanying the news about the record-breaking ice melt in Antarctica over the holidays.… Read the rest of the article: This penguin escaping from a cracking glacier is an edge-of-your-seat thriller

James Hatch is a former a Navy SEAL who has dealt with PTSD for nearly half of his 52 years of life. So it was kind of a big deal… Read the rest of the article: A 52-year-old ex-Navy SEAL reflects on his first semester as a freshman at Yale

I met Andy Bothwell on Warped Tour in the summer of … 2003, I think? My friends' emo band had somehow secured a spot on the Code Of Tha Cuts… Read the rest of the article: A great new podcast explores the cultural and political impact of the Only Band That Matters: the Clash

Not to be confused with that painfully mediocre Dave Eggers novel, Netflix's new reality show The Circle is basically the IRL version that Black Mirror episode where Bryce Dallas Howard… Read the rest of the article: Netflix's "The Circle" is my seventh layer of hell, and I can't stop watching it

I'd seen this before, but I was reminded of it when I saw Billy Bragg share a webcomic version of it on Facebook. But here are Woody Guthrie's New Year's… Read the rest of the article: Woody Guthrie's 1943 New Year's Resolutions are a powerful reminder to "Keep the hope machine running."

There was an inspiring sight for indigenous and women's rights in the mountains of Chiapas this week, as more than 3,200 women from 49 countries reportedly gathered together for the… Read the rest of the article: Thousands of Zapatista women gather in the mountains of Mexico

Tales of piss-headed police officers dominated the news in the week before New Years (at least, in my social circles, if we discount everything related to Star Wars). In West Virginia,… Read the rest of the article: A bunch of rookie cops have recently been fired for doing bad things. Let's think about that for a moment.

I've always understood Australia to be a nightmare hellscape full of crazy killer creatures. But that's only because I hadn't heard about the quokka. This teddy bear-sized marsupial lives on… Read the rest of the article: Australia is only a horrifying natural death trap so it can balance out the adorableness of the quokka

Speculative Identities is a site run by Roger Strunk that analyzes and examines the graphic design and UI details of science fictional companies. For example, the myriad corporations that comprise… Read the rest of the article: A deep dive into the visual branding of Cyberdyne Systems from the "Terminator" films

The X-Men are often cited as a pop culture metaphor for the struggles of persecuted peoples in the face of bigotry. But the allegory is far from perfect. It's barely… Read the rest of the article: Review: "The Nobody People" is like a literary X-Men novel for the Trump era

Generated Photos is the latest stupid startup that sounds like a joke from "Silicon Valley" that someone took too far. From their announcement on Medium: Generated Photos is the free… Read the rest of the article: This company wants to use AI to help you pretend to increase diversity

"Fairytale of New York" is, unequivocally, the best Christmas song. Because it's actually a bleak story about the false veneer of holiday spirit as a metaphor for the soul-crushing deceptions… Read the rest of the article: Enjoy 101 different versions of "Fairytale of New York"

The staff at Vilnius Airport in the capitol of Lithuania decided to celebrate the holidays a little differently this year — by creating a Christmas tree out of the various… Read the rest of the article: This Christmas tree is so fucking metal

From the University of Saskatchewan: Wild pigs typically weigh between 120 and 250 pounds. They have around six piglets per litter, per year. They are adapted to very cold temperatures,… Read the rest of the article: 30-50 feral hogs are now building pigloos

Matt Shea has served as a state representative for Washington since 2008. He's also a violent religious separatist and a member of the extreme right-wing Patriot Movement. Shea was an… Read the rest of the article: This Washington State Representative has been accused of domestic terrorism and won't step down

Ever since the glorious disaster that was Cambridge Analytica and the entire political climate of 2016, Mark Zuckerberg has been making the rounds from press outlets to private meetings with… Read the rest of the article: An exclusive interview with an AI neural network based on Mark Zuckerberg