Over the past decade or so, Lauren McLaughin (previously) has written a handful of outstanding YA novels, each dealing with difficult issues of gender, personal autonomy and the casual cruelty of teens, starting with Cycler (and its sequel, Re-Cycler) (a teenaged girl who turned into a boy for four days every month); Scored (a class-conscious surveillance dystopia); The Free (a desperate novel about a teen car-thief in juvie) and now, her best book yet: Send Pics, a gripping thriller about se...| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
Wendy Liu grew up deeply enmeshed in technology, writing code for free/open source projects and devouring books by tech luminaries extolling the virtues of running tech startups; after turning down a job offer from Google, Liu helped found an ad-tech company and moved from Montreal to New York City to take her startup to an incubator. As she worked herself into exhaustion to build her product, she had a conversion experience, realizing that she was devoting her life to using tech to extract w...| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
Dale Maharidge is a journalist and J-school professor who is dear old friends with the muckracking, outstanding political documentarian Laura Poitras. Jessica Bruder (previously) is a a writer and J-school prof who’s best friends with Maharidge. When Laura Poitras was contacted by an NSA whistleblower who wanted to send her the leak of the century, she asked Maharidge for help finding a safe address for a postal delivery, and Maharidge gave her Bruder’s Brooklyn apartment address. A few w...| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
John Chu is a third-generation gold farmer whose sherpa guild — which squires wealthy, incompetent players around VR games for a price, dodging EULA enforcers — has gone viral after being namechecked by an actor whom they helped prepare for a major role.| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
Nutt came to fame when he served as the UK “Drugs Czar” under the Labour Government in the late 2000s; especially when Home Secretary Jacqui Smith fired him for his refusal to lie and say that marijuana was more harmful than alcohol, despite the extensive evidence to the contrary (Smith also threatened Nutt for publishing a paper in Nature that compared the neurological harms of recreational horseback riding to harms from recreational MDMA use, a paper that concluded that if horses came i...| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
Sarah Gailey is one of science fiction’s great new talents and their 2019 debut novel Magic for Liars was incredibly strong; now they’re back with Upright Women Wanted, a feminist, genderqueer science fiction western novel about gun-toting roving librarians who are secretly the heart of an antifascist resistance.| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
[[Chelsea Manning’s support team sends us this update on Chelsea Manning and her courageous fight against Grand Juries, which has seen her imprisoned for months, effectively in solitary, a situation that the UN Rapporteur on Torture has deemed to be a form of torture. Our hearts are with Chelsea. -Cory]]| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
In 1979, construction concluded on the Awhatukee House of the Future, a $1.2m model home in the new Phoenix suburb of Ahwatukee Village, co-built with input from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Associated Architects and equipped with 10 networked Motorola processors that retailed for $30,000.| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
Burbank librarian Sarah McKinley Oakes (previously) also nannies for a six year old whose parents are French Stewart — from Third Rock from the Sun — and the actor Vanessa Claire Smith. Smith and Oakes have a friendly, normal relationship, but when it comes to French Stewart, things are awesomely weird.| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
Baycon is a large, regional science fiction convention that’s been serving the Bay Area for 38 years; I attended several times when I lived in San Francisco and this year I was tickled to be invited to attend as Author Guest of Honor. The event is May 22-25 (Memorial Day Weekend) at the San Mateo Airport San Francisco Marriott (at Hwy 92 & 101 in San Mateo, CA). The convention is one of the best regional cons I’ve ever attended, with an outstanding mix of fannish activities (boffer swords...| Cory Doctorow's MEMEX
