If you want to know a country, look at its art. This is the advice the curator of the Twitter account @CanadianPaintings once gave as a tour guide in Europe. It’s advice she now thinks Canadians might well consider taking, too. But that’s not why she first started the Twitter account, just to be clear.

“How it started was, I’m a teacher, and I had a Twitter page for my teaching and I just enjoy art. So, every time I saw art pop up on my screen, I’d be happy,” she told me recently. “Then I thought, none of the…

So this happened in China. In 2019, two university students did an AI project that involved a simple ‘wolf versus sheep’ game. The senior member of the team, a Thai national studying in China, left to work in Australia after he graduated, and the project was thus abandoned.

The junior member went on to teach. One day in March 2021, he told one of his students about the initial results of the experiment over text. The student was so tickled by the story, he screenshot it and shared it with his friends.

Those screenshots went viral on Chinese social media…

Before the Internet (yes, I’m that old) “going online” meant calling my friend Phil’s computer from my own. I’d put a phone handset (there were only what we now call “landlines” back then) into a special cradle with two rubber cups — one for the mouthpiece and another for the earpiece. Then I would manually dial the phone number, wait for his computer to pick up and make a tone, and hit a key on my computer to initiate the handshake.

There wasn’t a lot to do. Phil had a few games on there. And there was a folder with…

One morning in 2015, as 59-year-old Sally Misha Hamana waited for a department store clerk to serve her, a man — “a gentleman,” she says — lined up next to her. “I like your hair,” he told her. His throwaway comment left her speechless. She’d stopped coloring her grays a few months back, and her cropped pixie cut was 100% silver. “What does it matter what I look like?” she’d thought. “Nobody sees me anyways.”

The struggle began in her forties, when she was marketing a Texas rodeo. People began talking over her. Dismissing her ideas. Long-term colleagues sidelined her…

POV: You’re a 14-year-old kid in Atlanta. It’s 1978, and the internet hasn’t been invented yet, so you mostly get your kicks over the phone. You love to call up your local radio station, WQXI, to request your favorite oldies. This time, however, the line’s been disconnected. A prerecorded message plays in your handset instead. QXI’s AM call-in number is now 741–0790, and QXI’s FM call-in number is… Just as you’re about to hang up, you hear something weird: After the recorded message ends and just before it loops again, you hear someone else on the line. They’re yelling “Hello…

Open Dialogue

This is Open Dialogue, an interview series from OneZero about technology and ethics.

I’m Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology. One of my favorite activities is talking with smart and engaging people who think deeply about responsibility and the paths for creating a better future. In the “Open Dialogue” series, I’ll reach out to academics, journalists, activists, tech workers, and scientists to explore how to better understand controversies, more thoughtfully analyze innovation, and critically determine which leading ideas and behaviors need to change.

I’m excited to talk this week with Clive Thompson about how the…

An overtly racist video by conservative YouTube star Steven Crowder did not violate YouTube’s hate speech policy, the company told OneZero, though it has been taken down for other reasons. The stance highlights the broad leeway for bigotry in the platform’s moderation rules, even as it cracks down on certain categories of content, such as Covid-19 misinformation.

In a March 16 livestream, Steven Crowder and his co-hosts on the show Louder With Crowder — which has 5.4 million subscribers — performed grotesque caricatures of Black people. The bits were part of a segment mocking provisions in the new U.S. Covid-19…

Every month, a couple accounts contact me on Instagram, say they work for the platform, and threaten to delete my handle unless I click on bogus URLs designed to collect my personal information. As far as I can tell, they’re after one thing: My blue check mark.

I’m decidedly not famous, but I have a verified Instagram account thanks to a previous job. (I ran the company Instagram, among other things.) Scammers often send me sketchy messages saying my profile has violated copyright law and will be removed in 24 hours if I don’t fill out a form. I…