Remember how my previous employer denied my WFH request so that I could flee the state of Ohio to take care of my trans kid while still working for a company I loved?
I just heard they did it to someone else today.
When you insist people come in to an office a few days a week because you want a "hybrid culture" not a "remote culture" and then tell them to just fuck off when all they want to do is get their kid somewhere safe that makes you an absolutely shitty person.
I'm done hiding who it was.
The company is #OverDrive, based in Cleveland. They make ebook lending software for your local library called #Libby. They say they care about their LGBTQIA+ employees and families but that is clearly a lie.
Ohio lawmakers are turning my home state into absolute garbage and companies like this one are playing along.
[Edit, since this is doing numbers: The reason my request was denied a little over a year ago, despite me explaining in detail why, was because they "want a hybrid culture, not a remote culture." (a quote from a senior leader to my face)
In both 2020 and 2021 while the whole company was working remotely I won two annual employee excellence awards for my work on their Security team, while the company had record growth.
Meanwhile, one of my teammates moved out of state to be closer to family and continued to work remotely.]
In the most glorious "fuck you" I have seen in a while, you know the book that Cumberland City Council banned because they're homophobic bigots - Holly Duhig's "A focus on Same Sex Parents"? Well, the publisher, BookLife Publishing, have made a PDF version of the book available for free.
Sure be a shame if it was shared far and wide now, wouldn't it?
Every time you ban a book filled with hope and kindness, and care and love, we will resist.
The Banned Book Club is a project of the Digital Public Library of America. You download their Palace e-reader and choose Banned Book Club as your #library. It gives you access to all (most?) of them plus others
A pack horse librarian delivering books in rural Kentucky in 1938. During the Great Depression, the Pack Horse Library Project was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in which the librarians, who were often called "book women" or "book ladies," delivered books to remote parts of Appalachia.
The advance reader copies of my forthcoming book have arrived and they are beauties! Thanks to @wwnortonlibrary for supporting this investigation into how we can stop culture wars in the U.S. -- by understanding their history, and recognizing psychological weapons before they harm us and our communities. #StoriesAreWeapons drops in early June but you should pre-order now! Imagine how pleasing it will be to have an antidote to culture war this hot presidential race summer. #bookstodon#books
By default, Elsevier surveils every page a student visits on the internet — whether it’s related to their education or a google search for nearby abortion clinics. Then, their wildly permissive terms of service say they can build profiles on individual students and sell this information to data brokers
This Douglas Adams quote from 'The Salmon of Doubt' never stops being relevant, especially in a time where we've witnessed the damage disinformation and hate speech can cause. Lives have been literally lost, both by people spreading lies during the pandemic, and by bigoted rhetoric targeting women and marginalized groups. Legitimizing such views as just "difference of opinion" instead of challenging them for what they are only causes further harm.
Going through my notes on There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer (@JessieSinger), and I figured I'd share them here as I process them.
This is a book about how our systemic decisions make America a dangerous place to live. It really made clear to me that Covid is nothing new. We've always been needlessly cavalier with each other's lives - especially the lives of the poorest and most marginalized among us.
My publisher’s announced a change in the pricing for YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION: if you need or want a discount for any reason, you can use the code UNION to get 50% off the book when you buy it direct from @abookapart:
Octavia Butler once said:
“All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”
EDIT:Talked to an author friend who's affected: RN, authors are launching indep suits.
Link to unpaywalled search is in comments.
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If you're a published author and you haven't given permission for your book to be fed into Meta's, Bloomberg's or other AI training systems, please check the database in this article. If your work is there, you may want to join in on the lawsuit. This corpus has 183,000 (pirated) titles.
Was reminded of this Discworld quote and it holds so much truth. Not because the uber-privileged aren't heavily to blame, they are. But the inclination to mentally place the issue far away from us is also real. We want it to be some other men, some other white people, some other communities that are "bad", not ours, not here, so we are safe from the problem and free of the responsibility. But a major part of change and growth is self-reflection.
It's award nomination season! For your consideration, the best two things I published this year: The Terraformers, a novel, and "Unhearable Music," a short story which appeared in Rolling Stone's "future of music" issue. Thanks to all the kind people who supported me by publishing these strange stories about future ecologies, and mega-gratitude to my readers, who made The Terraformers a success.
George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and Jonathan Franzen are among 17 authors suing OpenAI, saying that the company fed their books into its large language models, allegedly violating their copyrights and engaging in "systematic theft on a mass scale." CBS has more.
I wrote a new book, called YOU DESERVE A TECH UNION. It’s coming out real soon. (I’m freaking out a little tbh!!) If you’d like to support the book slash get the word out, here’s how you can help!
AI-generated books on Amazon now have the potential to kill people, as they've moved into the realm of mushroom foraging. Guides have popped up like, well, mushrooms, packed with information that makes no sense and could easily be dangerous, illustrated with structures that are "the mycological equivalent of a picture of a hot blond with six fingers and too many teeth," writes Vox's Constance Grady. Here's more.