Month: March 2021

A searching look at beauty that’s more than skin deep – podcasts of the week

Naomi Shimada hosts The Beauty Fix, featuring guests including Queer Eye’s Tan France. Plus: cautionary tales, and diverse stories from the Arab world The Beauty FixNaomi Shimada, a plus-size model pushing the often-rigid boundaries of the fashion industry, is the host of this new podcast. Her interviewees include Tan France, Queer Eye’s confident fashion expert …

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Uber driver assaulted by unmasked rider: ‘People all over have experienced this’

Subhakar Khadka says video of San Francisco incident reveals abuse that often goes unacknowledged An Uber driver in San Francisco who was assaulted by an unmasked passenger has spoken out about the incident, saying that he was attacked after asking the woman to get out of the vehicle and taunted because of his race and …

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Roblox shares surge 60% on first day of trading after lockdown gaming boom

Trading debut in New York prompts huge demand for game system with 200m monthly users Shares in Roblox, the virtual gaming world that has proved to be a lockdown winner with hundreds of millions of mostly young players, have surged 60% valuing it at $47bn after an investor frenzy on its first day of trading …

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Mike Carey obituary

My friend Mike Carey, who has died aged 71, was a pioneer in the development of speech recognition and digital audio, including digital audio broadcasting (DAB). After a formative period at the Post Office research labs, Keele University and Mitel Telecom, he left in 1985 with Adrian Anderson and me to establish Ensigma, a company …

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‘I learned about storytelling from Final Fantasy’: novelist Raven Leilani on Luster and video games

Drawing on her own cathartic relationship with role-playing games, Leilani uses gaming as a narrative device and an inspiration in her acclaimed debut There is an extraordinary and telling moment in Raven Leilani’s acclaimed novel Luster, about a young black woman who has an affair with a middle-aged white man and ends up living with …

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14-hour days and no bathroom breaks: Amazon’s overworked delivery drivers

Drivers report being underpaid and having to urinate in bottles in their vehicles to keep up with delivery rates James Meyers worked as a driver for several Amazon delivery service providers in Austin, Texas, for about one year until he quit in October 2020 citing the immense workloads and poor working conditions. Continue reading… Drivers …

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An Impossible Project review – warm and fuzzy nostalgia in retro doc

Florian Kaps – Vienna’s answer to Steve Jobs – enthuses over analogue hardware and makes a persuasive case for life beyond the digital realm Here is a documentary about the resurgent interest in retro culture that comes across like a warm fuzzy blanket of nostalgia for pre-Covid days. The central figure is “Doc” Florian Kaps, …

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