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We Need Writers More Than Ever. Our Democracy Depends On It | Time

A mediasphere designed for spectacle can’t be expected to fix the oversimplification it creates. We need writers for that, and we need them badly. Literature, like democracy, is built of a plurality of ideas. Poems, plays, essays, biographies, short stories and every other form of literary practice partake of the complex range of perception and thought specific to human beings. By writing and reading, we remind ourselves of the value of empathy, subtlety and contradiction. Literature is an antidote to the blunt distortions—good vs. evil, us vs. them—that are so easily exploited by those who would manipulate us. Writers have been instrumental in the overthrow of repressive regimes from the French Revolution to the Velvet Revolution, which made playwright Vaclav Havel the President of then Czechoslovakia.

Writers tend to fare badly under autocrats. Dictators understand very well that the strength of thought and analysis that literature embodies is a threat to the mind control that is an essential feature of tyranny. In countries like China, Russia, Turkey, Myanmar and Bangladesh, writers are routinely jailed or killed for creating work their governments find threatening. For American writers, the reality of such scrutiny and peril can be hard to fathom. We need to write now, write well—tell the truth in all its messy complexity. It’s our best shot at helping to preserve a democracy in which facts still exist and all of us can speak freely.

journalism openfuture literature authoritarianism
6 minutes ago by corrales

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How to Stop Spam Robocalls With STIR/SHAKEN

“The solution: the STIR (Secure Telephone Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) standards. The idea: make it so every phone has a certificate of authenticity attached to it — a kind of digital signature — that allows you to once again trust your caller ID.”

spam robocalls 2018
9 minutes ago by handcoding

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‘Upside down’ cosmic rays may be new particle | Cosmos

Each and every second your body is struck by hundreds of cosmic rays, particles that are created from some of the most energetic events in the known universe, such as exploding stars or accreting blackholes. via Pocket

IFTTT Pocket
13 minutes ago by domingogallardo

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GitHub - kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap: Roadmap to becoming a web developer in 2018

Below you find a set of charts demonstrating the paths that you can take and the technologies that you would want to adopt in order to become a frontend, backend or a devops. I made these charts for an old professor of mine who wanted something to share with his college students to give them a perspective.

software engineering web programming learning dev career advice github repo
13 minutes ago by rbf

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