Spammed if you do, spammed if you don't. Chickenboners, mainsleazers and spiders are out to get you. Ben Fogelson of Eugene Weekly looks at bulk e-mail, "an increasing irritant in the folds of international cyber-flesh." He examines who's doing it, who's trying to stop it, how you can beat it back and even how to speak a little spam.
About 75 percent of the members of Local 2110 signed a letter to VVM management declaring their "profound outrage and disgust" at last month's cuts, which they chalk up to "greed on the part of the paper's owners." Sadness and paranoia now rule at the paper, says Cynthia Cotts, who also reports that two of the seven employees originally laid off have been hired back. More controversy may be just around the corner: Cotts reports that "many staffers dislike the redesign that debuts in next week's issue."
When the free weekday tabloid Express debuted Monday morning, the City Paper and its band of merry pranksters were prepared, hawking 10,000 copies of its own Expresso at subway stops across the nation's capital. The City Paper parodists, led by Webmeister Dave Nuttycombe, "anticipated the journalistic emptiness of Express," according to Slate's Jack Shafer, who says the Post's new lite version "ladles the news out with an eyedropper into tiny text boxes and then flattens it with a steamroller." Also revealed: The editor of Express is none other than Dan Caccavaro, former editor of AAN-member Valley Advocate.
Thanks to a section of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows a court clerk to rubber stamp a subpoena, the Recording Industry Association of America is sending out hundreds of subpoenas to ISPs across America, who are forced to turn over the names of downloaders. Creative Loafing's Steve Fennessy talks to college students, industry watchers and music pirates about the recording industry's efforts to save itself by suing its customers.
In 2002, one-third of New Orleanians newly diagnosed with HIV were female, most of them African-American women. That number has been rising rapidly. Almost no one is talking about it. Gambit Weekly's Katy Reckdahl talks to two women who are willing to be open about their diagnosis. One has a red AIDS ribbon tattooed on her back. The other has outlived all the pallbearers she selected when she first got the news she was infected and thought she would die within months.
When the World Transhumanist Association met for a conference at Yale in June, they discussed the future rights of those who will be half-man, half-machine. The Village Voice's Erik Baard looks at uploading consciousness, bio-Luddites, and that nagging question: Who are we? "My gut says we'll never have the answer to that question," a Yale ethicist tells Baard.
