Articles

• A Letter to the Broken Hearted Nest Observer by Kaeli Swift

"Predation is the transfer of life and that life is a gift. It's a gift that ensures the survival of another, and even if we don't know that individual as well as the one we watched perish, it's not for us to assert that it, or its offspring, deserves that gift any less."

• Access Manifesto by Joe Clark

"Designers assume accessibility means a boring site, a myth borne out by oldschool accessibility advocates, whose hostility to visual appeal is barely suppressed. Neither camp has its head screwed on right. It's not either-or; it's both-and."

• Against Access by John Lee Clark

"Such a frenzy around access is suffocating. I want to tell them, Listen, I don't care about your whatever. But the desperation on their breath holds me dumbfounded. The arrogance is astounding. Why is it always about them? Why is it about their including or not including us? Why is it never about us and whether or not we include them?"

• Airpods are a Tragedy by Caroline Haskins

"Thousands of years in the future, if human life or sentient beings exist on earth, maybe archaeologists will find AirPods in the forgotten corners of homes. They'll probably wonder why they were ever made, and why so many people bought them. But we can also ask ourselves those same questions right now."

• Artisanal Intelligence

"We must not lock culture behind intellectual property; we must fight for a world where your work being copied doesn't rob you of your income, where it just doesn't matter that much."

• Bees Gone Wild by Daniel Rubinoff

"And yet all its success with humans has made Apis mellifera into something of a bee monster. In North America, it isn't colony collapse or bee mites or pesticides that is the biggest threat to many of the 4,000 native bee species, it's the ubiquitous honeybee."

• The Black American Influence, The Jealous White Gaze, and The Devouring of South Korean Media by Moji

"In recent years, this bastardization of Black culture has been a very successful marketing tool for Korean entertainment companies looking to gain a Western audience. As an indirect result of that, many popular South Korean artists have become victims of the same white gaze that the Black artists they are copying have suffered under since the initial rise in popularity of Hip-Hop and R&B in nonblack communities."

• Blunt Force Ethnic Credibilty by Som-Mai Nguyen

"Indeed, whether by naiveté or narcissism, many diasporic writers seemingly cannot accept that The Motherland doesn't care for them and their psyche's under-processed, shapeless projections onto a culture to which they do not hold the keys alone, if at all, no matter what White people on committees think."

• Canada is Fake by Alex Green

"The logic of resource extraction, led by private companies and enforced by the state, is what motivates Canadian policy and justifies Canadian national identity. Canada is three mining companies in a trench coat, wearing a stupid hat and carrying a gun."

• Cheating by Arnie Ferner

"I've watched people marvel over the art until someone mentions the technique or methodology, then the attitude changes, the admiration shifts to dismissal, the smile turns into a sneer. It's no longer “special” because it suddenly seems like a dirty trick. If the art wasn't magically conjured out of thin air... well!"

• Copyright is Broken by Eevee

"It seems to me that we could all stand to be a little less possessive of our ideas, and a little more delighted when they inspire someone else."

• Copyright Won't Solve Creators' Generative AI Problem by Cory Doctorow

"Under these conditions, giving a creator more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid extra lunch money. It doesn't matter how much lunch money you give that kid – the bullies will take it all, and the kid will still go hungry (that's still true even if the bullies spend some of that stolen lunch money on a PR campaign urging us all to think of the hungry children and give them even more lunch money)."

• Don't Tell Me to Despair About the Climate by Morgan Florsheim

"As I consider how I want to live my life, where to dedicate my energy, I refuse to accept the idea that I must sacrifice all joy to attend to the world's problems. I know myself to be more helpful when I have addressed my own needs: needs for good food and good company, for hope, for long afternoons in the sunshine."

• The Great Offline by Lauren Collee

"True disconnection, like true wilderness, is an empty goal. Whether we have shunned social media or not, the internet does not cease to exist as a driving force in the world, any more than ecological systems cease to shape our lives the minute we reach the end of the forest trail and hop back in the car."

• I'm Still Here: Back Online After a Year Without the Internet by Paul Miller

"I'd read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I'd begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was "doing to me," so I could fight back. But the internet isn't an individual pursuit, it's something we do with each other. The internet is where people are."

• In Defence of Pigeons by Steve Portugal

"Having spent many hours observing pigeons in St James Park in London, I have seen them caked in oil, milk and human vomit. I have watched pigeons with one foot missing, both feet missing, with only one leg, or trapped in bits of litter. Yet they soldier on."

• Involuntary Bioslaughter and Why a Spider is Dead by Piotr Naskrecki

"It is very easy to fixate on an individual case of an organism being deliberately euthanized. We do it because it is convenient emotionally — it is much easier to feel superior when we can point a finger at somebody who does it consciously, even if for a good, justifiable reason, but we don't like to think about those trillions of animals and plants that we kill by virtue of simply going to a grocery store."

• Is it OK to Have a Child? by Meehan Crist

"Getting from eight billion to three billion people would mean doing away with more than 60 per cent of the human population. If we act now to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, there is the chance of a better outcome for more people; if we act now to reduce global population, we have to ask, what "humanity" are we preserving?"

• Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price

"It's morally repugnant to me that any educator would be so hostile to the people they are supposed to serve."

• Lies of the Land by Out of the Woods

"This nature is framed as part of the 'birthright' of a nation, and in a disturbingly völkisch turn-of-phrase Kingsnorth states that if 'you want to protect and nurture your homeland - well, then, you'll want to nurture its forests and its streams too'. This desire to wrap forests in the flag clears the way for what the critical scholar of ecofascism Peter Staudenmaier calls a 'deadly connection between love of land and militant racist nationalism.'"

• The Narcissism of Queer Influencer Activists by Jason Okundaye

"There is a deeply rooted narcissism that lies at the heart of a lot of online queer politics. Queer influencer activists scramble to frame all things through queerness as it allows them to insert themselves into narratives for issues which have nothing much to do with them at all."

• On Hyperpersonalized Sexual Identity by Kravitz M.

"Having a plethora of specific atomized sexualities discourages broad alliances and forming solidarity over shared experiences. Instead, it forces people to over-analyze themselves and focus on how they're different from others rather than what they have in common with them."

• Queer is Still a Slur by Kravitz M.

"Many outspoken LGBT individuals reclaim 'queer' or even refer to their sexuality exclusively as “queer,” which they have every right to do. However, there's also a growing insistence from some that it's a superior, more inclusive alternative to other labels, and they'll actively call other LGBT people 'queer' by default. I find it odd and disrespectful, considering its history — and current usage — as a slur. It's even more peculiar that some deny this entirely."

• "Tell Me Why" Smothers its Representation in Bubble Wrap by Dia Lacina

"How do you convey marginalized identities to outsiders? Is there an answer? No, I don't think so. Not when we're still misusing "let queers be messy" and raking them over the coals for being messy and exploring and interrogating their own identity-dependent traumas. How can we expect cis creators aim for anything but safe perfection? This is it. This is The Representation. Is it everything you hoped for?"

• There is No Moral Imperative to Be Miserable by James Greig

"While good intentions lie behind the tendency to blame capitalism for our mental health woes, leaning too heavily into the idea has unintended consequences. When you're depressed, rationalizing your way out of getting better is the last thing you should be doing. It doesn't matter how well-researched or even objectively correct those rationalizations might be."

• The Trees That Miss the Mammoths by Whit Bronaugh

"Warning: Reading this article may cause a whiplash-inducing paradigm shift. You will no longer view wild areas the same way. Your concepts of 'pristine wilderness' and 'the balance of nature' will be forever compromised. You may even start to see ghosts."

• What Does it Mean to be Palestinian Now? by Noura Erakat, Ahmed Moor, Noor Hindi, Mohammed El-Kurd, and Laila Al-Arian

"Outside of Gaza, to be a Palestinian in this moment is to go through the motions of life while feeling dead inside. It feels like it should be a state of emergency, but all around us life goes on."

• Who Are the Scientists Here? by Nell Freudenberger

"Teiho gestured toward the lagoon. 'You don't need a degree to understand this,' he suggested. 'It's obvious.'"

• Your Trauma is Your Passport by Yasmin Nair

"Even in seemingly private lives, those without trauma narratives are constantly asked to draw detailed images of the suffering they have endured. Increasingly, a woman without a tragic story is no woman at all. Trauma has been sacralised, taking the place of motherhood and wifedom."