To get a sense of the scale of the problem, The New York Times commissioned an analysis to tally the number of impersonators across social media for the 10 most followed people on Instagram, including Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. The analysis, conducted by Social Impostor, a firm that protects celebrities’ names online, found nearly 9,000 accounts across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pretending to be those 10 people.

Amazon likes to think of its marketplace as a merchant meritocracy where the best products get the best reviews by virtue of quality and honest consumer feedback, But the vast size of the platform, coupled with a ferocious competition among sellers to get higher product rankings, has spawned a problem: A proliferation of fake reviews.

The second night of the first Democratic primary debate of the 2020 cycle broke records with 18.1 million people tuning in on live television across NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo, according to a press release from NBC.

Marie Newman, the progressive primary challenger running against conservative Democrat Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL), said on Tuesday that she’s losing staffers due to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s blacklist against any vendor who works with non-incumbent candidates.

In our politics as in our daily lives, we live on a spectrum of forgiveness so wide that it’s hard to stretch the meaning of the word to cover it all. On one end is the effortless absolution we offer those we love — forgiving what your toddler spills or your partner forgets, the featherweight lapses that barely test grace. Somewhere in the middle are the minor lifts of mercy needed to let go of grievances against friends and colleagues.

Sex, drugs, violence,  hate speech, conspiracy theories and blunt talk about suicide rarely are more than a few clicks away. Even when children are viewing benign content, they face aggressive forms of data collection that allow tech companies to gather the names, locations and interests of young users.

The scientific literature on this subject is robust, and the consensus overwhelming. The lower your parents’ income, the lower your likely level of educational attainment. Period. But instead of focusing on ways to increase household income, educationists in both political parties talk about extending ladders of opportunity to poor children, most recently in the form of charter schools.

Members of the military deployed near the U.S.-Mexico border have been assigned to spend a month painting a mile-long stretch of barriers to improve their "aesthetic appearance."

Basic cyber-hygiene, were it in place, could have greatly limited the damage in Baltimore or stopped the attack altogether. The ransomware, called RobinHood, worked only because city computers had not applied freely available software patches and were operating without effective backups.

Nothing is more important than voting Trump out next year, and I suspect that Biden is surging in the polls in part because, rather than pretend that the election is about so-called kitchen table issues, he’s taking on Trump’s desecration of the presidency directly. What worries me about Biden — above and beyond policy disagreements — is that, in contemporary politics, the quest to find an electable candidate hasn’t resulted in candidates that actually win. Voters don’t do themselves any favors when they try to think like pundits.

Romania under Ceausescu created a dystopian horror of overcrowded, filthy orphanages, and thousands died from back-alley abortions. opponents of the restrictive abortion laws currently being considered in the United States don’t need to look to fiction for admonitory examples of where these types of laws can lead.

As David Mimoun, a scientist working on the mission, told Scientific American: “It’s so small that at the beginning we were wondering if it was a quake or something else.”

Interesting article about how a bunch of socially inept loner nerds who loved sitting alone in front of a computer created an education program that had children sitting alone in front of a computer most of the time. Most of the kids rebelled. Totally shocking response.

The Times wrote that it shared its rationale for making the redactions with WikiLeaks “in the hope that they would similarly edit the documents,” but Assange does not appear to have been impressed. He followed no journalistic practices or journalism ethics in subsequent data dumps.

“We’ve got to really consider whether we do military… help getting this aid in to save the starving people of Venezuela,”

Glass is dropped at campaign event. Hickenlooper picks up glass shards with his bare hands. What does this mean for his electability? Did he fumble the glass or was it knocked out of his hand? Or did someone near him drop it when Hickenlooper bumped into him? Was it appropriate to pick up glass shards with bare hands? Read this important discussion from politico, one of the top serious news sites on the internet.

Ella Briggs, an 11-year-old Connecticut resident, became her state’s first openly gay “kid governor” in January ― and she’s aiming to one day have national and even global impact. 

A new case report from the Centers for Disease Control released Thursday starkly highlights the costs of not vaccinating children. It details an unvaccinated 6-year-old boy’s encounter with tetanus—and the hugely expensive, two-month-long effort it took to save his life.

I know this is an issue that matters much more to me than others here. But this is an interesting article that explains with clear evidence one of the ways music has become more banal.