There’s a reason so many people find the art world to be impenetrable and elitist - it’s designed to be. Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting my local art gallery; it’s a great place to take the kids, and often, I discover beautiful and thought-provoking pieces. But sometimes, I feel downright frustrated by the works that have been chosen for inclusion.

The world’s most polluting companies could be sued for their contributions to global warming, a major human rights inquiry has found in what has been described as a “landmark victory for climate justice”. The head of a Philippines Commission on Human Rights panel, which has been investigating climate change for three years, revealed its conclusions on Monday that major fossil fuel firms may be held legally responsible for the impacts of their carbon emissions.

The “deja vu”, as I termed it, began creeping over me again. Each time it happened, I tried to fight it off, as if it were a war waged within my mind. I knew that I only had a short time to get away from people before they would notice something wasn’t right. I’d usually escape to the bathroom and lock the door, where the throes of this thing could overtake, and I could return to normal as if nothing ever happened.

The message from Israel arrived on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon for 36-year-old Beau Villereal. At his family’s sprawling 42-acre property outside Live Oak in Florida’s rural north, Villereal sat alone in his bedroom trawling for news about Donald Trump to share on the rightwing Facebook page he runs with his mother and father.

America, home of the brave, land of the free, is watching. Tens of millions of cameras are watching people across the country. The total number of cameras in the world could reach 45 billion by 2022, when the global video-surveillance industry is forecast to reach $63 billion.

There’s some backstory to the current Rudy Giuliani drama I’d like to share. After he left the mayoralty at the end of 2001 Giuliani made tens of millions of dollars on his reputation as “America’s Mayor” and a 9/11-based terrorism and security expert under the shingle Giuliani Partners. In the nature of things that rep was more valuable abroad than at home. He cashed in big time. That went on for about 15 years with a brief timeout for his failed 2008 presidential bid. He also had his own law firm Bracewell Giuliani, before leaving the firm to join Greenberg Traurig in 2016.

Udo Schuklenk says screening out would-be doctors who would object to providing health care on conscience grounds would avoid debates over things like Alberta's Bill 207.

No one can agree on what a sentence is. The safest definition is typographic. A sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop—except that some start with quote marks, and some end with question or exclamation marks, so that doesn’t quite work. Let’s try again. A sentence is the largest domain over which the rules of grammar have dominion. Thus it stands grammatically apart from the sentences around it.

The worn hinges squeak as I pull the heavy wooden door open. Inside is a cavernous room, its walls made of stone. Looking back at me is a fireplace with a wrought-iron log holder that reminds me of an overgrown spider. The stone surrounding it is scarred with black ash.

There are people who believe that the political polarization now afflicting the United States might finally start to subside if Americans of both parties could somehow become more empathetic. If you’re one of these people, the American Political Science Review has sobering news for you.

"I don't want to be a flat Earther," David Weiss says, his voice weary as he reflects on his personal awakening. "Would you wake up in the morning and want everyone to think you're an idiot?"

"Data as oil” has been the default metaphor to describe the way the capture, processing and repurposing of our personal information is changing the world, one typically used by the perpetrators of these practices.

That was one of the questions posed by an Australian farmer, who has accused some plant-based diet converts of ignorance towards the death toll of small animals associated with crop production. Southern Tasmanian farmer and former food critic, Matthew Evans, has recently released the book ‘On eating meat’, which poses many questions regarding the processes behind meat production and delves into the ethical arguments surrounding it.

It is not quite true that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Musicians and novelists, for example, can become extremely rich by giving other people pleasure. But it does appear to be universally true that in front of every great fortune lies a great crime. Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it. The very wealthy, almost as a matter of definition, are committing ecocide.

For many years, Facebook’s internal slogan was "move fast and break things." And that’s what the company did — along with most other Silicon Valley startups and the venture capitalists who fund them. Their general attitude is one of asking for forgiveness after the fact, rather than for permission in advance. Though this can allow for some bad behavior, it’s probably the right attitude, philosophically speaking.

The climate is just one of a range of serious issues that needs a progressive president ready and willing to implement a serious crisis plan in 2020.

I don’t know who sold progressive Democrats on the idea that the way to beat Donald Trump is to abolish the private health insurance of 160 million Americans and offer instead “Medicare for all” (and Mexico will pay for it), but it’s a political loser and an easy target for Trump to feast on. A much better campaign theme is hiding in plain sight. I call it “the Earth Race.”

A team of researchers from UC Santa Barbara and Intel took thousands of conversations from the scummiest communities on Reddit and Gab and used them to develop and train AI to combat hate speech. Finally, r/The_Donald and other online cesspools are doing something useful.

Jef Bezos wants to have you from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death embraces you or your credit card gets cancelled, whichever comes next. And that’s why he has came up with the Amazon Echo Loop — a ring that puts Alexa right on your finger so you can whisper at it when you need more toilet paper.

Friday’s climate strike by students across the globe will have no more impact than the mass mobilizations by women following the election of Donald Trump or the hundreds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets to denounce the Iraq War.