PJ Vogt

Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited today, a service that allows you to pay a flat $9.99 per month in exchange for unlimited eBook downloads.  

What happened when a black woman writer went online disguised as a white man? She got a lot fewer death threats, for one thing.    

GIFGIF is a project from the MIT Media Lab designed to find the perfect GIF for all of our core online emotions. 

On July 2nd, NPR education blogger Anya Kamenetz landed in hot water for the following tweet: 

I reach out to diverse sources on deadline. Only the white guys get back to me :(

— NPR's Education Team (@npr_ed) July 2, 2014

Two weeks ago, The Washington Redskins hired liberal blogger Ben Tribbett to help defend their name, which Native American groups have been petitioning them to change. 

The EU's Right to Be Forgotten law means that Google can be forced to hide links to unflattering stories about people. The BBC's Robert Peston wrote yesterday that he'd received notice from Google that his work was being censored under the new laws:

A UK regulator is looking into whether Facebook's emotional manipulation study violated data protection laws. 

Former fictional radio host Kelsey Grammer has begun using Twitter, and is supposedly hell-bent on correcting the grammar of wayward Twitter users. 

Last week, Facebook announced it had conducted an experiment on some of its users without their knowledge or permission. 

France's parliament passed a law this week that's been nicknamed "The Anti-Amazon Law." 

To help sway public opinion, a company called the Internet Research Agency pays people in Russia to go to an office and post pro-Kremlin comments all day.

Canadian lawmakers passed a very ambitious anti-spam law that goes into effect July 1. Individual spammers can be fined up to $1 million, companies that spam can be fined up to $10 million, according to the CBC. 

Many men on Tinder like to post profile pictures of themselves cuddling tigers. 

Every human adult person has at least one website they read religiously, but that they shamefully alt + tab away from whenever a coworker walks by. 

The Wikimedia Foundation announced a rule change this week. Anyone who’s been paid to edit a wikipedia page (public relations firms, for instance) is now required to disclose that on the site.

She may not always communicate in complete sentences, but she's convincing enough that teenagers actually converse with her. Also, she's very, very funny.

Hi, TLDR listeners. It's Alex and PJ. We're writing this article to let you know that for the next couple weeks, we're asking people who love TLDR to consider supporting our show.

It’s surprisingly hard to email your elected officials. There’s a forest of forms and hoops to jump through, presumably because politicians get tons of spam and want to make it so that the only people who email them are real humans who have made a dogged attempt to do so. Which is good for their inboxes, but arguably a little wobbly as a democratic idea.

Last month, we talked about SHRTURL, a website that makes it easy for people to create fake news articles that look like they've come from reputable websites.

The Unicode Consortium released two hundred fifty new emoji yesterday. The new set doesn't add any racial diversity, although you do get an image of a derelict house.