Various and Sundry

Tuesday Tech Tale of Terror: Sinister Smartphones

Really, I had to post something for Halloween, didn’t I? Jean Twenge’s longform article in the Atlantic about the damage of smartphones has been making the rounds on my social media channels since it came out in September. It’s stayed with me perhaps because it’s another parenting conundrum to keep one up at night. I was reminded of the article as well because of a recent piece in the Independent that pointed out how Bill Gates…

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Various and Sundry Writing

Aubrey de Grey and the Efforts to Engineer Away Aging

Sean Illing has an interview in Vox with biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey about his work on tackling aging. Aubrey de Grey, whose prodigious beard is dwarfed by his prodigious research ambitions, famously believes that combating aging is an engineering problem. In other words, medical therapies can be developed and can be worked on now given our current scientific understanding of aging damage. I remember first learning about the work of Dr. de Grey when he and others set up…

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Various and Sundry

Tuesday Tale of Terror: Living Without a Cell Phone!

I have a long, long list of articles I save to read later… and eventually, later becomes “now.” Alan Levinovitz has a piece in Vox from March 2016 that is sure to chill certain technophiles to the bone: going through modern life without a cell phone. Missing a friend’s birthday party was my final impetus to get a cell phone originally. My confusion about the location would have been solved with a two minute phone call or a…

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