Official website of author Karen E. Bender

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.

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…

The violent response to an attempted murder would have happened regardless of Musk, Lee Hurley writes.

Five Italian divers died in a cave at 55 m. Before anyone delivers a verdict, here are the questions Just Culture demands we ask first — and why their sequence matters.

A blog series in which I reread LOTR 50 years after I first read it, age 10, over the winter of 1975-76. Pippin and Merry come as a double act (not exactly ‘dumb and dumber’, but not a million miles from that either) in the Jackson film version of LOTR, providing both light relief and…

NFTs, the metaverse and AI are the most recent Silicon Valley enthusiasms. Does anyone remember how to build a consumer product?

<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?

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

Samples collected from asteroid Ryugu contain the four genetic “letters” of DNA, reinforcing the hypothesis that the chemical origins of life were present when…

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

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...

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

This blog post takes us back to 2010, retracing and incident where a statistical anomaly led to the discovery of a subtle flaw in the way we were using a security-critical library.

Mismanagement and political campaigning have sucked the joy out of an event meant to bring people together