Official website of author Karen E. Bender

Mark Zuckerberg built a future that nobody wanted. Tech bosses are repeating his mistake

In 2013, education reformers tried to help poor students the using the best tool at their disposal: The 16th most popular Ted Talk.Special thanks to Marcus Credé! Where to find us: Our PatreonOur merch!Peter's newsletterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSo...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • HUGO AWARD FINALIST • In this poignant, heartfelt novella from the New York Times bestselling author of Spinning Silver...

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Like Imperial Japan before us, the United States has substituted tactical and operational planning for strategic thinking.

By Lee Vinsel

I'm reposting this essay I wrote in 2021 because the online blogging platform Medium has apparently changed its policies and people are having trouble accessing the original. Hopefully, I'll find a better, more durable solution soon. I'm reposting it unaltered, even though I would unsurprisingly do some

Talkspace has amassed “one of the largest mental health data banks in the world,” according to reports to investors, containing 140 million message exchanges.

<strong>Exclusive: </strong>The strange and lonely death of Bikram Lama exposes a glaring gap in homelessness services. What hopes and dreams brought him to Australia, and what went wrong?

William Shatner was excited to go to space last year. He didn't realize he'd be overwhelmed with sadness and go through "the strongest feelings of grief" that he'd ever experienced.

Criticism of public schools is not entirely wrong – but by ignoring unequal conditions, it misdiagnoses the problem and misplaces responsibility.

I work in a sector that speaks out on racism and human rights, yet on this issue I have felt the boundaries of acceptable speech narrow around me

Hey folks! I am working on finishing up some things this week, so I thought I would post the text of the keynote I gave at the Prancing Pony Podcast Moot earlier this December. I've made some minor edits to conform a bit more to the form of a blog post, but this remains very…

A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.