policy

Clean slate laws are sweeping the country, offering many of the estimated 70 to 100 million people with a criminal record the chance to have their record expunged. The benefits seem straightforward: Making a criminal record no longer…

The potential gold standard for online content governance in the EU—the Digital Services Act —is now a reality after the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly for the legislation earlier this week. The final hurdle, which is a mere…

Ethicist and researcher Lucy Sparrow further argues for the need for a “community manager” approach to moderation, whereby some moderators are tasked not just with quietly managing content behind the scenes, but with actively cultivating…

Today, in a ruling on a nonexistent plan with nonexistent harms to the people who brought the suit, the Supreme Court took an opportunity to curb the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the power sector’s carbon…

Shortly after I learned about Eliza, the program that asks people questions like a Rogerian psychoanalyst, I learned that I could run it in my favorite text editor, Emacs. Eliza truly is a simple program, with hard-coded text and flow…

The Supreme Court on Friday overturned the legal right to abortion in the United States, returning the ability to regulate the procedure to the states, more than half of which have promised to ban it. The decision in Dobbs V. Jackson…

On Tuesday, May 31, the Canadian government made a ruling that was the first of its kind for the country. Starting on January 31, 2023, the province of British Columbia will conduct a trial—lasting three years—in which people over the…

An official high up in the agency essentially agreed with her critique, Bottemiller Evich reports. The agency has “too many programs and not enough resources,” Janet Woodcock, FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, told her, “and the…

Stewart says public interest in spiders and scorpions has exploded as people realize they are actually low-maintenance pets that don't need walking three times a day and can be kept in apartments or small homes without a backyard.…

Historically, a state’s legal code has been assumed to stop at its borders. And for the most part, states have not prosecuted residents who leave to do something that is legal at their destination but illegal at home. “Before it became…