Right from wrong. We teach our kids what this means in the classroom and at home. But what about online? The next generation of tech users could be a part of much more civilized digital universe, but only if they learn how now. Manoush talks to Richard Culatta (CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education) about the five steps to creating good digital citizens, and how to turn the current online “culture shift” into something positive, respectful, and more accessible to all.Sign up for Manoush’s newsletter StableG.com/newsletter and find her other podcasts atZigZagPod.com and IRLPodcast.com

How to Create Good Digital Citizens

Computer scientist and cult-blogger, Cal Newport, wants you to take 30 dates off from all your personal tech. A month off, he claims, is the only way to truly adopt Digital Minimalism, his method for finding tech-life balance and the name of his latest book. Manoush loves a digital detox as much as the next overloaded person, but she explains to Cal why she has issues with his particular prescriptions. 
Manoush writes a newsletter that comes out every other Thursday. Sign up at StableG.com/newsletter and find her other podcasts at ZigZagPod.com and IRLPodcast.com

Why Everyone is Talking About Digital Minimalism

In 2018, Andria Zafirakou was named Global Teacher of the Year and given $1m in prize money. Why? Because this innovative art teacher (and mother of two) helped transform her struggling school in London’s poorest neighborhood into an educational powerhouse: the Alperton Community School now ranks in the top 4% of ALL UK schools. Andria says the techniques she uses in her classroom can be used to improve education on a global scale. On this episode, she shares her creative know-how and how we can all prepare the next generation of innovators… and get more creative ourselves.
Sign up for Manoush’s newsletter StableG.com/newsletter and find her other podcasts at ZigZagPod.com and IRLPodcast.com

How The Best Teacher Teaches Creativity

The tech show about being human returns with an all new season. Host Manoush Zomorodi kicks things off with the latest on the battle between kids and parents over their screens: do we know how kids are impacted by tech? Does it make them less empathetic? Are they being constantly bullied online? Even if we can help kids figure out their digital habits, are we adults totally screwed? Researcher Elizabeth Englander joins Manoush to share new findings and give the most pragmatic advice about how kids and adults can build better relationships with their tech and each other.

Note to Self is Back and We Start with The Big One: Kids and Screens

Note to Self helps you navigate the digital age by making sense of its most undervalued component: humans! With all new episodes coming every Tuesday, host Manoush Zomorodi investigates the very personal role technology plays in our lives and how we can live better with it. Because you are so much more than an algorithm.

Note to Self is Back!

This week we’re discussing government censorship in China, #metoo and cryptocurrency.
Endless Thread is hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, and is made by WBUR.
You can listen to the show at wbur.org/endlessthread

Rice Bunny: The Me Too Movement Comes to China

Long-distance friends Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec spent a year tracking the little things in life. Thanks yous, coffees, complaints, street sounds. And each week, they turned their small-scale data collections into whimsical hand-drawn postcards.
On a minute level, they may not say much. But look at them together and they tell an intimate story. This week, Giorgia and Stefanie talk us through three weeks of data, and all the big lessons in our most mundane moments.
Look at more postcards by Giorgia and Stefanie here. 

Dear (Data) Diary

With former Google designer Tristan Harris, who explains how far Silicon Valley will go to capture and control your eyeballs. And Snapchat artist CyreneQ, who makes her living drawing on her phone all day. For real.

A Different Kind of Streaking

We asked you guys to send us photos. Then we gave them to Andreas Weigend, veteran of Xerox Parc, former chief scientist at Amazon, to see what he could deduce. A lot, it turns out.
A little Google image search, a little metadata, and we can find where you are. Maybe who you are. What color phone you’re using to take the shot, and how many SIM cards you have.
Reading photos is more than a digital parlor trick. It’s the future of commerce, marketing, policing, lending, and basically everything else.
 

Your Metadata is Showing

Bot armies are taking over Twitter. But they’re not necessarily trying to advance a point of view, according to Phil Howard, a bot researcher. They’re aiming to sow chaos and make dialogue impossible. At the extreme, the goal is to destabilize our very sense of reality.  
“Their strategy is to plant multiple conflicting stories that just confuse everybody," Howard says. "If they can successfully get out four different explanations for some trend, then they've confused everybody, and they're able to own the agenda.”
This week, why someone would sic a bot army on Manoush. And what her bot brigade can teach us about how bots are shaping democracy, from the 2016 election to Brexit to the recent French election.
You can check if a Twitter account following you is real or fake, with Bot or Not, an aptly-named tool from Indiana University's Truthy project.

Whose Bot Army Is Following Manoush?

This week, Note to Self gets in our time machine, back to the Supreme Court cases that defined privacy for the digital age. Stories of bookies on the Sunset Strip, microphones taped to phone booths, and a 1975 Monte Carlo. And where the Fourth Amendment needs to go, now that we’re living in the future.
The amendment doesn’t mention privacy once. But those 54 little words, written more than 200 years ago, are a crucial battleground in today’s fight over our digital rights. That one sentence is why the government can’t listen to your phone calls without a warrant. And it’s why they don’t need one to find out who you’re calling.
But now, we share our deepest thoughts with Google, through what we search for and what we email. And we share our most intimate conversations with Alexa, when we talk in its vicinity. So how does the Fourth Amendment apply when we’re surrounded by technology the founding fathers could never dream of?
With Laura Donohue, director of Georgetown’s Center on Privacy and Technology. Supreme Court audio from the wonderful Oyez.org, under a Creative Commons license.
 

The Fourth Amendment Needs Your Attention

The Dark Web conjures images of gothic fonts and black backgrounds, like a metal fan’s MySpace page circa 2001. But this section of the internet looks surprisingly normal. Accessible only through the TOR browser, there are Google-style search engines and Amazon-style marketplaces. Except what they’re selling are mostly illegal things—stolen passports, hacked account numbers, and drugs. A lot of drugs.
This week, we stress out WNYC’S IT department and venture onto the Dark Web. Where you can get heroin, fentanyl, or oxycontin shipped right to your door via USPS. And we talk to Nick Bilton, author of American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road, about how Libertarian philosophy and tech-bro hubris combined to spark an online drug revolution—and an opioid crisis.
And the Dark Web community is starting to recognize the role they're playing. Since we recorded this episode, Hansa Market - the very site we visit in the show - has banned the sale of fentanyl, according to the New York Times. 

Is the Opioid Epidemic a Tech Problem?

Today, listener stories and tips: we wrap up our No Filter series of conversations about how women live online.
From YouTube megastar Lele Pons to iconic artist Barbara Kruger, we heard a joyous mix of vulnerable confessions, utter defiance, and (for once) a mostly positive vision of what being a woman on the web can look like. To wrap it up, stories from you. About how you’re reconciling the IRL you with the online you. Plus, The Cut’s editor-in-chief Stella Bugbee is back with her greatest hope for the next generation of women in the workplace.
 

How To Have No Filter

We couldn’t close out No Filter, our series on women owning it online, without profiling Jasmyn Lawson, former culture editor at Giphy. That's the search engine that houses all those looped videos we use to express emotion - and ourselves - online.
But when Jasmyn started working there, she couldn’t find many gifs that looked like her. "Just having Beyonce and Rihanna and Nicki Minaj is not enough to say you're representing black women." So she made her own.


Jasmyn Lawson
(Ryan Pfluger)


 

No Filter: Jasmyn Lawson

 
The iconic artist talks to Manoush about our curated selfies, owning a font, and why we all need likes. Plus, The Cut’s editor in chief Stella Bugbee.
If you missed the other episodes of No Filter earlier this week, go back! Instagram megastar Lele Pons, Transparent actor Trace Lysette, painter Amy Sherald, who made Michelle Obama’s official portrait, and anchor Christiane Amanpour.

No Filter: Barbara Kruger

The CNN anchor talks to Manoush about sex, wearing a “uniform,” and staying profesh on air and online.
Plus, Call Your Girlfriend co-host and Cut contributor Ann Friedman, who almost fell out of her ergonomic chair when she found out she’d be in the same episode as Christiane.
Christiane’s new show is Sex & Love Around the World. And Ann’s podcast is, of course, Call Your Girlfriend, with Aminatou Sow.


Christiane Amanpour, on No Filter: Women Owning It Online.
(Brigitte Lacombe)


Every day this week, a new episode of our series, No Filter: Women Owning It Online, with New York Magazine’s The Cut. Five conversations with badass women. And trust us, you don’t have to be a woman for this series to be a must-listen.
We’ve heard from Instagram megastar Lele Pons, Transparent actor Trace Lysette, and painter Amy Sherald, who made Michelle Obama’s official portrait. Tomorrow, we close the week with iconic artist Barbara Kruger.
 

No Filter: Christiane Amanpour

Her portrait of Michelle Obama went viral. Painter Amy Sherald dismisses the haters. “Some people want their poetry to rhyme.”
Plus, Allison P. Davis, Senior Culture Writer at The Cut, on how picking Amy was like Michelle Obama choosing her own Instagram filter. 



Painter Amy Sherald, our guest for day three of No Filter: Women Owning It Online.
(Susana Raab )


This is day three of our weeklong series, No Filter: Women Owning It Online, with New York Magazine’s The Cut. Five conversations with badass women. Some old, some young. ALL have bent the internet to their will. And trust us, you don’t have to be a woman for this series to be a must-listen.

No Filter: Amy Sherald

Every day this week, a new episode of our series, No Filter: Women Owning It Online, with New York Magazine’s The Cut. Five conversations with badass women. Some old, some young. ALL have bent the internet to their will. And trust us, you don’t have to be a woman for this series to be a must-listen.
Transparent star Trace Lysette talks to Manoush about the political nude selfie, her #metoo moment, and constructing her self online and IRL. Plus, how her life as a young trans woman prepared her to confront Jeffrey Tambor and live her truth.
With Noreen Malone, features editor at The Cut. 


Trace Lysette, our guest for day two of the No Filter series.
(Ryan Pfluger )


This is day two of No Filter. Yesterday, Instagram megastar Lele Pons. Coming up, painter Amy Sherald, who created that stunning portrait of Michelle Obama. CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour. Iconic artist Barbara Kruger, who blew all of our minds. Plus writers from The Cut.

No Filter: Trace Lysette

Every day this week, a new episode of our series, No Filter: Women Owning It Online, with New York Magazine’s The Cut. Five conversations with badass women. Some old, some young. ALL have bent the internet to their will. And trust us, you don’t have to be a woman for this series to be a must-listen.
Today, Lele Pons. And if you’re thinking “Lele who?”, you’re not a teen girl. The Instagram megastar talks to Manoush about crafting her image, controlling her edits, and why she gives her cell number to fans. And Allie Jones, senior writer at The Cut, who wrote a profile of Lele in 2017.
Coming up tomorrow, Transparent actor Trace Lysette. Wednesday, painter Amy Sherald, who created that stunning portrait of Michelle Obama. Then CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, and iconic artist Barbara Kruger, who blew all of our minds. Plus writers from The Cut.

No Filter: Lele Pons

It’s here! The first episode in our new series, No Filter: Women Owning It Online, with New York Magazine’s The Cut.
Today, our launch episode. Every day next week, a new conversation with a badass woman about the highs and lows of living online. And how they've bent the internet to their will. Trust us, you don’t have to be a woman for this series to be a must-listen.


Erica Joy Baker, senior engineering manager. (Amy Harrity )


Since #metoo, we’re rethinking what it means to be a woman in the world. But what about being a woman online? In this first episode, why we need No Filter. Plus, we go deep with senior engineering manager Erica Joy Baker. She’s worked behind the scenes at Google, Slack, Patreon. Sites we use to present ourselves to the world, built mostly by white men. Erica explains why that really matters.  
It wouldn’t be a Note to Self series without your voice. How do YOU portray yourself online? How does the internet mess with your head? How do you mess back? Let us know. Record a voice memo from your browser or phone. Or email us at notetoself@wnyc.org. 

Note to Self

Note to Self

Get Started

Download the App