Given its visual component, Jewish individuals have turned their feeds on Instagram into collective spaces to fight antisemitism and anti-Zionism and educate on Jewish history, ethnology, Judaism, and more.
Last summer, on the morning of August 26, a dozen students from the University of Delaware gathered up to witness in distress the smoky remnants of the blue building they considered their second home. Barely a few hours before, in the midst of the night, an unidentified subject had intentionally set a blaze that destroyed their beloved center for Jewish life, a Chabad House located just steps away from the heart of the alma mater’s main campus.
As some students were strategically coming up with fundraising ideas and initiatives to bring back their communal temple to life, 2,500 miles away…
Trump’s reigning ideology will have lasting consequences to ripple out across American politics. Unfortunately, for many years to come.
“With Joe and Kamala, you’re not going to have to think about the crazy things they say every day,” he exclaimed in front of the silent assembly of hundreds.
“You’re not going to have to argue about them every day. It just won’t be so exhausting. You might be able to have a Thanksgiving dinner without having an argument,” he continued, followed by an exhilarating response from the crowd.
The above-stated words were part of former President Barack Obama’s speech at a drive-in rally in Philadelphia last October 21st. …
Even though the virus is of equal treatment, the working conditions are not.
Isabel Garcia has recently been given the option of working remotely. However, for the 32-year-old second-generation Guatemalan, the task is proving to be more challenging than she previously imagined. Quarantined in a 2-bedroom apartment with her two children, aged 18 months and four years, enduring a cut of her salary of 35%, her experience has been far from ideal. Her husband Manuel doesn’t even have such ‘luxury,’ since he’s been commissioned to deliver food essentials across the country to a series of supermarket chains. Isabel’s situation is similar to that of millions of Americans: she can’t afford to stay home.
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As the COVID-19 outbreak spurs mass buying, people are flocking stores for toilet paper, but why?
Last Saturday afternoon, Lucia, a 27-year-old marketing consultant, decided to head to her nearest shop in Madrid, Spain, to pick up some routine food supplies. What started as a quick errand turned into a four-hour nightmare, wandering several stores, seeing people fighting over toilet paper and canned tomatoes and navigating checkout lanes filled with hundreds of shoppers amid a state of emergency declaration over the COVID-19 pandemic.
This apocalyptic scene of people desperately panic buying toilet paper has become one of the most repeated images seeping through social media. From Wuhan and Hong Kong to Milan and California shoppers have…
With climate crisis looming, white supremacists are using the environment as grounds for a racist nationalism ideology
On June 8, an anonymous manifesto was posted to 8chan, the online message board that’s become known as a haven for extremism. The post, though long gone (but preserved thanks to Google’s cache feature), expresses a deep fear of population growth:
“Today, as a result of this industrial society, mass-consumption […] there just being too many people overall, the environment and the creatures and plants within it are threatened with extermination and destruction,” the post reads. “The Industrial Revolution laid the seeds for globalization, streamlined mass-immigration, pollution, unsustainability and the soulless consumer culture of today. …
A new A.I. text generator has ability to write convincing prose. Can an algorithm imitate one of the most complex of human abilities?
What if I tell you there’s a program that has the ability to write convincing texts? So much so, that one will only have to give it a prompt and the system will come up with the desired text effortlessly. A text so well-written it could masquerade as a piece created by a human. Sounds quite superb, doesn’t it?
Developed by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based research institute — co-founded by none other than the Silicon Valley entrepreneur…
As more people fall deep into conspiratorial thinking. Is Silicon Valley doing enough to stop this threatening trend?
There’s never been a better time to become a conspiracy theorist. From the moon landing, staged in a TV studio, to global warming, a hoax invented by scientists, and even vaccinations being evil and causing autism, conspiracy theories are more alive, more pervasive and widespread than they have ever been before in history.
Conspiracy theorists are thriving in the current political climate, and they might be shaping it too. We are at a pivotal moment in democracy since post-truth reality is gaining ground and penetrating every corner of the political and social spectrum. …
The photo app is making us depressed, lonely and miserable. Why can’t we stop scrolling through the illusion?
Who would’ve thought that the simple use of photography could again revolutionize the world? After all, it was a long time ago since Kodak — once a very powerful company — branded our ‘moments’ with the introduction of the compact camera. Instagram has revived and re-awakened the phenomenon radically changing the landscape of digital-sharing photography embedding it in our collective consciousness. But, how does the app affect the way we see ourselves? And, what negative consequences will the promotion of a perfect lifestyle bring to our mental health?
Undoubtedly, photography has seen a new light on Instagram, its use has…
From taxes to travel and milk cartons in bulk: If you’re single, you’re being penalized for it
Singledom is appallingly expensive. Period. You pay more if you fly, sleep or eat by yourself. Not to mention if you’re carrying the full burden of a mortgage and insurance premiums, then it all adds up for us singletons. But why the penalties? Well, they are the high price one has to pay if one is not part of a couple.
Societies are purposely designed for married people. Around the world, a lot of people suffer from institutionalized singlism. The discrimination of individuals based on marital status seems to be the rule. Still today, in the western world, being married…
As computers learn how to mimic us, are we starting to be more like them?
Silicon Valley is predicting more and more how we are going to respond to an email, react on someone’s Instagram picture, determine which government services are we eligible for, and soon a forthcoming Google Assistant will be able to call our hairdresser for us in real-time.
We have invited algorithms practically everywhere, from hospitals and schools to courtrooms. We are surrounded by autonomous automation. Lines of code can tell us what to watch, whom to date, and even whom should the justice system send to jail.
Are we making a mistake by handing over so much decision-making authority and control…
Orge Castellano
Journalist and multilingual researcher at your service. More stories on https://orgecastellano.com
