Amanda Jones is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads. I’m just a school librarian from a two red-light town.” Jones’ cautionary and disquieting testament to the nation’s divisiveness is told in her new memoir, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” a …
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Concocting a strategy that solves this problem—known as private information retrieval—is “a very useful building block in a number of privacy-preserving applications,” said David Wu, a cryptographer at the University of Texas, Austin. One major goal, still impossible with large databases, is the equivalent of a private Google search, where …
There’s an old story about Octavia Butler that I often return to: A young man once asked the visionary science fiction novelist the answer to ending all the suffering in the world. Although she’s publishing a book and stars in movies, Monáe is best known as a musician, and it was her 2018 concept album, Dirty Computer, that defined her …
