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There is a false presumption that little trans history exists on record, that the trans experience is some neat trend of the present. Part of that is willful ignorance; another factor is that the archive of transgender lives is largely made up of works never meant to be consumed by the masses. The internet has been key in counteracting inaccurate narratives by bringing about a sea change for transgender archives and bridging the digital and the pre-internet worlds.

What has been most crucial in recent years is the integration of these archives for research purposes. Central to that effort is the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA), an initiative that started at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and will soon relocate to Boston’s Northeastern University. In the past, trying to uncover what was available in individual archives often proved to be a tall order for trans researchers. The DTA brings together collections from around the world, centralizing a marginalized community’s scattered histories within a single search engine. It has created an incredible opportunity to investigate, whether as a researcher or as an amateur, how trans communities of the past wrote about and expressed their experiences, and also how they responded to the moments when mainstream society looked back at them.

Many of the publications operated in secret out of self-protection—one newsletter was irreverently titled Ssshhh!—in light of the fact that Virginia Prince had at one point been arrested for publishing Transvestia. The legal and professional risks of being outed for their trans identities had led many writers to forgo bylines or take on pseudonyms. There were also many trans people who never identified with the queer community at large and who created publications that distanced themselves from the social and political conflicts that concerned the movement at the time. Some of that attitude resulted in exclusionary, predominantly white publications and groups that splintered these communities for several decades. Prince herself, unfortunately, was one of the publishers guilty of this practice. Her hostility toward certain segments of the trans and cross-dressing communities led to those whom she marginalized building their own publications and support groups.

It’s the most bananas artistic undertaking of this century. DAU, as the project is known, is a Soviet thought experiment that brings together A-list artists, world-class scientists, a handful of famous actors, Cambridge Analytica (almost), and a lot of Russian money to create 13 feature-length films, as well as an online experience and a rich auxiliary cultural program. The Guardian called it a “Stalinist Truman Show.”

The DAU films are on view until February 17 inside two of Paris’s main public theaters, the Théâtre de la Ville and the Théâtre du Châtelet, which are open 24 hours a day for the event. If you show up as the pale winter sun is rising, you’re likely to bump into people just leaving after a night of carousing. The event features pop-up concerts (Robert del Naja from Massive Attack, Brian Eno), seminars (the writer Jonathan Littell, French academics), drinks (wine, vodka, Cognac, kvass), and food (borscht, gloppy Russian salads)

As part of the project, priests, rabbis, imams, shamans, and psychologists are on call to discuss people’s experiences of DAU and to film their responses, which visitors can opt to archive or delete

Aesthetic choices have long shaped how American audiences see the world. Historically speaking, the West’s visual vocabulary tends to champion a fascination “with abjection and violence” in foreign subjects, whether that be the sinister depictions of Japanese people in World War II propaganda, Native American mascots in sports, or distressed communities in Africa and the Middle East.

Using repetitive, stereotyped tropes to signify that China is exotic, authorientalism visually links these tropes to abuses of government power, thereby promoting the view that authoritarianism is part of the essential character of Chinese-ness. It conflates the culture and the government, and reinforces the state’s own frequent claims that authoritarianism is innate to Chinese history or society.

Two Russian journalists working for a popular pro-Kremlin website filled it with anti-war articles on Monday morning in a rare act of dissent as the country celebrated the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.

“We had to do it today. We wanted to remind everyone what our grandfathers really fought for on this beautiful Victory Day – for peace,

Polyakov, who works as a business reporter at Lenta, said he and his colleague Alexandra Miroshnikova published more than 40 articles critical of the Kremlin and its actions in Ukraine. The articles have since been taken down, but can be accessed through a web archive tool.

Art from the Middle East is outgrowing its "Orientalist" straitjacket.

a major exhibition in London's British Museum called Inspired by the East, that explores the significant - yet often unacknowledged - influence of Eastern culture on the West

"People might forget that there has been an exchange between East and West for centuries, much longer than we think and while, of course, some of that has been warfare, a lot of it has been diplomatic relations and artistic exchange. "Looking at this through an artistic medium and showing how there has been this interest in the 'other' from both directions over the years shows that there has been an ongoing dialogue."

what would later be claimed, by those who led it, as one of the most successful propaganda operations in postwar British history. A top secret operation that helped overthrow the leader of the fourth most populous country in the world and contributed to the mass murder of more than half a million of its citizens.

Recently released in Britain’s National Archives are pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact written by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.

The outcome of the turmoil was a brutal and corrupt 32-year military dictatorship whose legacy shapes Indonesia to this day

As a Marxist, Benjamin was alert to the political implications of patrician disdain, and suggested that what he called “reception in distraction” might actually help in understanding the kaleidoscopic bustle of modern urban life. However, the association of new media with crises of attention goes back much further. In Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature, the literary scholar Natalie Phillips describes how the proliferation of early print publications changed reading habits. Instead of devoting one’s attention to a small library of precious books, it was now possible to dip into things, to divert oneself with articles in gossipy magazines such as The Tatler and The Spectator, even—horror of horrors—to skim. In the introduction to Alexander Pope’s mock epic The Dunciad, the pseudonymous Martinus Scriblerus (writing from the future) explains that the poet lived at a time when “paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors covered the land.” The result was information overload. Samuel Johnson complained that readers were so distracted that they “looked into the first pages” before moving on to other options. One of the lasting monuments to this new print culture, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, makes a comedy of its narrator’s distraction, which he attributes to his mother having interrupted his father at the crucial moment of conception to ask whether he’d remembered to wind the clock.

In 1754, the encyclopedist Denis Diderot wrote that distraction arises from an excellent quality of the understanding, which allows the ideas to strike against, or reawaken one another. It is the opposite of that stupor of attention, which merely rests on, or recycles, the same idea.

Distraction is certainly bad when driving a car or reading philosophy, but in other contexts, toggling between activities and juxtaposing different registers of information can be fertile and productive. Indeed, it’s key to creativity—at least this is what I (and my ninety-five open browser tabs) will maintain if you ask. It isn’t that the distracted writer is unable to focus on anything at all; his attention is captured, fleetingly, by various things, and whether that’s useful or not depends very much on context.

Wrongful arrests, an expanding surveillance dragnet, defamation and deep-fake pornography are all actually existing dangers of so-called “artificial intelligence” tools currently on the market. That, and not the imagined potential to wipe out humanity, is the real threat from artificial intelligence.

Beneath the hype from many AI firms, their technology already enables routine discrimination in housing, criminal justice and health care, as well as the spread of hate speech and misinformation in non-English languages. Already, algorithmic management programs subject workers to run-of-the-mill wage theft, and these programs are becoming more prevalent.

Because the term “AI” is ambiguous, it makes having clear discussions more difficult. In one sense, it is the name of a subfield of computer science. In another, it can refer to the computing techniques developed in that subfield, most of which are now focused on pattern matching based on large data sets and the generation of new media based on those patterns. Finally, in marketing copy and start-up pitch decks, the term “AI” serves as magic fairy dust that will supercharge your business.

The institution of local broadcast news is a young one, but among the most ubiquitous in the United States. It’s a pair of routines that unfold each night: As Americans gather to wind down their days, the medium has worked to deepen racial tensions and reinforce racial stereotypes about communities of color.

This format launched in Philadelphia, first with the birth of Eyewitness News in 1965, and then with Action News in 1970. Over the next few generations, the pervasive and seductive twin broadcasts would spread to stations across the country — and with them, negative narratives about neighborhoods that would effectively “other” certain groups based largely on race, class, and zip code.

The new breed of local news would transform how Americans received the day’s headlines. It would even change the substance of the news itself. Before Eyewitness appeared on America’s small screens, local television news hardly existed, with national stories dominating the day’s headlines as anchors vied for spots at big-city network markets. And it was delivered largely behind a desk, by a suited white man in a series of passive sentences.