I’m going to start archiving the links I send to an email newsletter I’ve started. See Newsletter Archives for more information!

Here’s what was important this week:

The UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism comments about whether The Guardian should have published Edward Snowden’s leaks: “There is, however, one issue on which I do not think reasonable people can differ, and that is the importance of the role of responsible media in exposing questions of public interest.

Labor in America (and elsewhere):

• “Though there is very little evidence to support the notion that minimum-wage increases lead to layoffs and unemployment, and a great deal of evidence to refute it, the retailers are sticking to their story, which is the story of the American economy of the past generation: lower prices and lower wages—a race to the bottom.”

• Ensuring that workers are paid a fair wage is a task that should fall to governments. But in a place like Bangladesh, where the government has demonstrated weak capacity to ensure minimum standards for wages and workplace safety, that responsibility falls in part to global brands.

• A compilation of books that have shaped work in America, in honor of the Department of Labor’s Centennial.

Two older black men are detained while traveling with a teenage white girl in Houston, TX. “If notarized proof that they are authorized to travel with the girl isn’t sufficient, that’s a tough question to answer. “

Are you wondering, Is my neopet still alive?

Is life just an illusion we’ve created? (and what does that say about your neopet?!)

“It’s not that there’s no material difference between living things and the inanimate; rather, we will never find some clean dividing line between the two because the notion of life and non-life as distinct categories is just that—a notion, not a reality.”

Disability is a social construction, all technology is assistive…

“disability is not about the state of a human body; it’s about the built environment, structures, and institutions that make life possible and meaningful—or conversely, impossible and meager—for certain kinds of bodies and minds.”

….and all design should be universal

“The old model was adaptation, or adapted design. You took a space and you adapted for use of the person with a disability. What universal design says is let’s turn it around and let’s just build everything so it is as usable by the largest segments of the population as possible.”

Planes, trains, and automobiles:

• “in the country as a whole, more resources continue to be spent on drivers and roads than buses and trains.”

• “the pilot is not supposed to be able to crash the plane by pressing one wrong button.”

Read this with this: digital art edition

1. Project l0ss showcases the lossy compression of the JPG file format, inspired by Generation Loss.

2. The audio art piece “I am sitting in a room” from 1969 now has a video counterpart, which explores what is lost through the mp4 codec and the process of uploading the piece to youtube and downloading it again, repeatedly.

And finally, your music recommendation of the week, a haunting remix of Swede Erik Hassle’s song Talk About It.