Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
Is an AI Backlash Brewing? What 'Clanker' Says About Growing Frustrations With Emerging Tech
A slur for robots and AI has emerged online in recent weeks, offering some sense of growing societal anxiety with increasingly capable technology.
It’s a slur for the AI age.
“Clanker,” a word that traces back to a Star Wars video game, has emerged in recent weeks as the internet’s favorite epithet for any kind of technology looking to replace humans. On TikTok, people harass robots in stores and on sidewalks with it. Search interest for the term has spiked. On X, Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., used the term last week to tout a new piece of legislation.
“Sick of yelling “REPRESENTATIVE” into the phone 10 times just to talk to a human being?,” he posted. “My new bill makes sure you don’t have to talk to a clanker if you don’t want to.”
“Clanker” appears to have peeked into the internet’s lexicon starting in early June, with Google Trends data showing a sudden uptick in search interest.
A slur is generally defined as a word or phrase meant to denigrate a person based on their membership to a particular group such as a race, gender or religion — one that goes beyond rudeness into overt bigotry. They are almost always directed at people.
But there’s a catch. By using a slur in a way that would typically apply to a human, people are also elevating the technology, offering some sense that people both want to put down the machines and recognize their ascension in society.
Did Craigslist Decimate Newspapers? Legend Meets Reality
Craig Newmark’s simple site turns 30. It was hailed as a disruptor and blamed for the collapse of classifieds. But journalism’s business failures ran deeper.
The decline of newspaper print classifieds and the ripple effects that gutted newsrooms began, by many accounts, in 1995. That’s when Craig Newmark invented Craigslist, the homely but oh-so-successful site that matches buyers and sellers, mostly for free, with only a few listings carrying a modest charge.
Did Craigslist drive the downfall of print classifieds?
“I’ve always wondered about that,” Newmark said in a Zoom interview July 1. “I think it had an effect.”
But portraying him and the list as torpedoing an otherwise great business model is way overblown, he still believes. Citing an influential essay by Thomas Baekdal, Newmark contends that the root of newspapers’ trouble was the loss of readers.
Here’s the tale of Craigslist’s rise to a business generating hundreds of millions of dollars a year, how Newmark has used that fortune and how newspapers, slow to adapt, failed to respond effectively to the digital shift.
Trump’s Afrikaner ‘Refugees’ Knuckle Down to Hard Reality in the U.S.A.
Three months after the first group of Afrikaner ‘refugees’ left for the U.S., many have gone to ground. A handful are speaking openly about their new lives, and a South African newspaper compiled what they had to say. Bottom line: They’re not happy.
A great deal of speculation — and lashings of schadenfreude from some quarters — has been attached to how the lives of the white Afrikaner “refugees” (“59ers,” as they call themselves) are playing out since President Donald Trump made his controversial decision to prioritize them for resettlement in the U.S.
Official channels seem to have gone entirely silent on the topic. In the absence of formal communication, a whole community has sprung up online.
The towering figure in this community is Chris Wyatt, a former U.S. military YouTuber whose following has almost doubled as his content has increasingly focused on offering advice to would-be Afrikaner “refugees”.
Wyatt has … posted video interviews with two of the “refugees”, the first being farmer Charl Kleinhaus.
Kleinhaus: “The biggest challenge is here you work ... There’s no kitchen lady you call to sweep the house, or clean the house, or stuff like that. You do the work yourself.”
Another 59er, Errol Langton, whose family group accounted for nine of the original 59, now calls Alabama home. He told Wyatt that he had a gig selling life insurance, but he hadn’t earned anything yet, as it’s commission-only. (Later he started working in a car wash.)
Langton: “You’re not given a job, you’re not given anything. This is the last month we have [free] accommodation.”
Prison Debt is Crushing Black Women, Often Because They Take On What Family Members Owe
Black people account for about 37% of the local jail and state prison populations, and the debt caused by the incarceration fees may be pushing women of color deeper into poverty.
The big picture: When incarcerated individuals can't pay — and most can't — the debt is passed to a loved one or follows them after release. In some states, debt collectors or probation officers send letters demanding full repayment within 30 days.
Data collected by the advocacy group Campaign Zero, reviewed by Axios earlier this month, shows:
As of December 2024, 48 states allow at least one "pay-to-stay" fee.
42 states and D.C. permit room and board charges for incarcerated adults.
43 states permit medical fees for incarcerated adults.
83% of those paying fines, fees, and bail for incarcerated people are women, according to a national survey.
Black mothers are three times more likely than white mothers to be their family's sole provider.
"We were the first to put this issue on the map — people were talking about mass incarceration, but no one was talking about families having their college funds and inheritances seized," said Brittany Friedman, a USC sociologist who leads the Captive Money Lab and was a consultant on the Campaign Zero project.
Friedman said her team analyzed hundreds of civil lawsuits and found a "repeat pattern" of states seizing jointly held assets — including college savings and shared inheritances — if an incarcerated person's name was on the account.
"In most cases, it drains the account completely," she said.
‘Hook Up?’ College Kids Schedule Literally Everything on Google Calendar
‘GCal’ dictates students’ every waking moment, from walks to class to what time they go to bed; It’s ‘kind of unnatural’
At Cornell, students use what they call “GCal” for everything.
Freshman Vanessa Long ticked off some examples: “What time they go to sleep, what time they eat, if they’re going on a five-minute walk, if they want to grab lunch with you at the one dining hall on campus that you go to every day.”
“I thought I was the peak of being organized, and it turns out that I don’t even scratch the surface,” she said.
Across American campuses, it’s commonplace for students to schedule out their days and weeks in color-coded blocks. No event is too small and virtually nothing is out of bounds. At some schools students have even used it to get a date.
One evening at the end of his freshman year at Williams College, Elijah Diallo was strategizing with friends about how to make a move on the cute girl in his theater group when he had an idea.
He sent her a GCal invite for the following Friday night. The event was titled “Hook up?” and set for 11:30 p.m.
“She responded with ‘yes,’ and then the rest is history,” he said. The two saw each other for the rest of the semester, though the romance fizzled after that.
“If I’m gonna make a move, I gotta make it funny at least,” Diallo said. “Google Calendar has such a place in all of our collective psyches at Williams College that it felt like the perfect way to execute it.”
Welcome to the College Parent Group Chat
Gen X parents are terrified to let their Gen Z kids grow up.
The anticipation of moving into a college dorm brings a flurry of questions:
Do RAs monitor who cleans the bathrooms?
Are the windows drafty, or should students bring a fan to beat the heat?
Are there schedules for using the laundry room?
Where can you hang up your wet towels?
But the above aren't questions from incoming freshmen. They're typed out from anxious soon-to-be-empty nesters in Facebook groups for parents of college students.
They want to know as many details about the unknown as possible, down to whether their children need to bring their own toilet paper.
Some questions are practical and logistical ... Others are so inane they offer a glimpse into a new era of helicopter parenting.
Parenting is "like a pendulum where we tend to overcorrect," says Amelia Kelley, an author and therapist who's also a millennial parent of young kids. "You have all these Gen X parents who were raised much more independently and free range, who are now being inundated with incredible amounts of information and technology and pressure for achievement with their kids."
'There You Are': How Mariska Hargitay Sought Out the Truth Behind Her Bombshell Mom, Jayne Mansfield
Emmy Award-winning Law & Order: Special Victims Unit actor Mariska Hargitay was just 3 years old in 1967 when her movie star mother, Jayne Mansfield, died in a tragic car crash.
Though she and her siblings were in the car at the time, Hargitay has no memory of the crash, and never had the chance to truly know her mother.
"One of the things that I grew up hearing is how smart she was, how determined she was, and what a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful sense of humor she had," Hargitay says.
But the private version of her mother that Hargitay grew up with conflicted sharply with Mansfield's public image as a hyper-sexualized, platinum blond starlet.
Hargitay's new documentary, My Mom Jayne, is an attempt to reconcile these two versions of Mansfield. She likens the filmmaking process to an archeological dig. Hargitay started by reading letters from her fans who brought up her mother. That led her to combing through storage boxes that hadn't been touched since 1969.
Hargitay says she was searching for glimpses of the woman behind the Hollywood façade, the smart mother of five who spoke multiple languages and played the piano and violin.
Hargitay:
At 34, I was in a motorcycle accident. … I went flying through the air and I remembered going — because it all happened in slow-mo — and I remembering going, "Oh my God, this is it, this how I'm going to die. I can't believe I'm going to die at 34 like my mother."
And then I landed on the asphalt, and I said, "I'm alive, and I'm not dying." And that was my a-ha moment. …
That is when I said, "this cycle is breaking now." I will not carry this with me. Her life is not my life. And I remember very cognizant of this, being very clear that this accident was somehow some kind of wake-up call to me. … This whole journey has been a long time coming.
Good stuff for a Friday! Thanks!
I worked at a newspaper when Knight-Ridder bought it. Interesting that Tony R. said that in 1999, yet the attempts to stave off the digital competitors were tame at best. Such denial that you'd think all newspaper publishers were Egyptian at that time. Ba-dum.