This Week #1

Racist sentiment inspired by economic anxiety and political disenfranchisement is still racist.

Ketan Josh has thoughts on the ‘classwashing’ of commentary surrounding One Nation’s rebirth. I am white enough, straight enough, male enough, tall enough, thin enough, handsome enough, smart enough, rich enough, and ‘Australian’ enough to have never had to justify my existence to or to feel oppression and hatred from any majority. Pauline Hanson’s words don’t hurt me, but they still hurt.

The Tofu Curtain is real. Tim Wardrop maps the breakdown of voting preferences by polling booth around Melbourne. The Greens are spreading and I am glad I live in the North.

Sam Wallmam, whose wonderful illustrations brought to life the horrific interview in At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story, is back. This time with the beautiful, So Below, a comic about land that is much more than it sounds.

America is terrible. It feels as though things will be much worse for a while before they can get better.

Aggression and corruption seem to be endemic to America’s police departments — it doesn’t have to be that way. The ABC’s excellent Trigger Point examines the culture — and specifically American-inspired training — of violence in Victoria Police over the last 40 years. Richard Fidler interviews Corey Allen on his efforts to shift Brisbane police toward community engagement.

Imagine if driving across town was a contest between competing algorithms. These algorithms would use existing data but they would also create synthetic data to spoof the data of a competitor.

When All is Optimized who wins? Do we need to start a movement for road neutrality already?

If you’re in any way interested in the intersection of design and code you should spend some time with Rune Madsen’s course on Programming Design Systems.

The Kid decided that wearing a plastic box on his head and wandering around is the greatest thing, so not everything is bad.