NPR

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A Giant Organic Farm Faces Criticism That It’s Harming The Environment : NPR

Hardly a week goes by, it seems, without a big food company making promises to deliver products from green, sustainable farms. Turning those promises into reality, though, can be complicated.

Take Gunsmoke Farms, a vast property that covers 53 square miles just northwest of Pierre, S.D. The food company General Mills, maker of Cheerios, announced in 2018 that it would convert the farm to organic production. The company planned to turn it into an educational hub to teach other farmers "how to implement organic and regenerative agriculture practices."

Now, some of Gunsmoke Farms' neighbors say that the farm is doing more environmental harm than good.

Kent State Shootings – 1970 Year in Review – Audio – UPI.com

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Kent State Shootings – 1970 Year in Review – Audio – UPI.com

Unknown Speaker: "A group of young people, mostly boys, we can determine the university student, were milling around the downtown area in Kent, where there is a collection of bars and night clubs, where most of the younger crowd frequent. At first they were simply milling around; not really unruly or disorderly. The crowd got larger, and then the violence broke out at about midnight."

Announcer: The place, Kent State University in Ohio. If you were there on May 4th, you would have seen a campus filled with Ohio National Guard units, called into quell student rioting, which began as a protest against the use of U.S. forces in Cambodia.

The guardsmen had been ordered onto the campus after the University's ROTC building had been burned to the ground in the second night of disruption by antiwar students.

So there you are, if a student, you're one of about 600 in a large grassy plain in the middle of campus. If you are a national guardsman, you are a part of the 100 on that same grassy plain. You would just disperse some students with teargas. Your rifle is loaded with real bullets. You stand side by side, walking up a hill. Suddenly a student throws a rock, then another. They are shouting. Then just as suddenly you turn to face the crowd, a skirmish line is formed. You lift your rifle and for about 30 seconds only, the sounds of shooting and screaming fill the air.

Why targeted Facebook ads are so weirdly personal – Vox

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Why targeted Facebook ads are so weirdly personal – Vox

Dan Nosowitz was scrolling through Instagram when he saw it: an ad for a cooking device whose sole function was to heat up raclette cheese.

“I had to click through because I had no idea what it actually was,” he explains. “Finding out that an algorithm believed I would be interested in a discount ‘traditional Swiss-style electric cheese melter’ is sort of comfortably bumbling. It’s like watching a Roomba bonk into a wall.”

Whether the humor inherent in the ad comes from the fact that the gadget is so oddly specific, or because raclette is an incredibly high-maintenance cheese and therefore hardly a common grocery item for most people, is difficult to say. What we do know, however, is that the complicated set of algorithms that serve targeted ads on social media are the most brutal, most incisive owns of our time.