Speaking at SXSW 2025, Graber appeared with her hair discreetly pulled back, dressed in black and wearing an oversized T-shirt, in what at first might have been interpreted as the typical strategy that, unfortunately, many female Silicon Valley executives employ: downplaying their feminine appearance. Don't worry, I have not become a fashion columnist, nor was the Bluesky CEO dressing down for no reason: her black T-shirt bore the Latin phrase, 'Mundus sine caesaribus', which translates as 'A world without Caesars'. A direct response to a similar T-shirt worn by Mark Zuckerberg in September 2024 that read 'Aut Zuck aut nihil', a play on Julius Caesar's phrase 'Or Caesar, or nothing'. Faced with a disgusting phony who runs his company like a dictator, running the world's largest social networks without any kind of supervision, Graber offers another vision: open-source, decentralized, and user-governed. Bluesky has been built to resist a takeover of the kind that has happened at Twitter. It is now clear that Elon Musk was not interested in turning the company around or protecting freedom of expression, and instead the move was about the transition into politics of a guy who'...
As soon as he gained power, Hitler set Germany upon a course of aggressive expansionism. But what lay behind his drive to conquer vast swathes of Europe' Gavin Mortimer investigates...
In every civilized society around the world, there's a trade-off that must be made. The protection of individual freedoms, on one hand, enable the people living there to pursue their own goals, dreams, and ideals, whatever they may be. But those pursuits must not infringe on the rights ' including the health, safety, and general welfare ' of others. When it comes to issues like the health, safety, and long-term prosperity of our society, there is no greater tool or resource we have to assess accurately them than science. It might seem like, at the start of 2025, we're headed in absolutely the wrong direction. Mass firings and layoffs at the NIH, the NSF, the CDC and more, coupled with the installation of a number of prominent anti-science cabinet members, the first deadly measles outbreak among children in a decade, and the USA's withdrawal (again) from the Paris Climate Agreement all signal a national move away from science. But this is not new. The fact is that Americans have been resistant to heeding the scientific consensus on matters of public policy for many decades, preferring stances that agree with their ideological preferences instead. This was highlighted in 2020 and beyond, as many refused to mask, vaccinate, or isolate at even the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This disregard for scientific facts extends even to the vilification of the scientists that find them, resulting in policies that recklessly endanger not only the health and safety of Americans today, but provide new generations with long-term challenges that they'll need to either reckon with or face the consequences....
