James' World 2

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Hello from low-earth orbit! I have spent hundreds of hours working here in virtual reality. Even as I write this to you, I have Facebook’s Oculus strapped to my face and am in an aptly named app called Immersed. It puts me in this orbiting spaceship where there’s just me, the computer screen in front of me, and—let me look out the window—Ecuador.

I’m not sure where Facebook’s Metaverse begins or ends; perhaps I am in it right now. But I am primarily a writer of English text and computer code, a solitary profession that rarely requires real-time meetings like those in the Metaverse demos. When I was a kid, I wrote homework essays on a manual typewriter. What I do now is not much different, except I don’t need to use that white correction tape stuff to erase typos—and I’m in space.

Working from home certainly feels isolating to all of us who do so, but when working from space I’m a thousand kilometers from the next human.

I wasn’t thinking about such things when I got this VR headset. I just wanted to be more comfortable and relaxed while working. Sitting at a desk is the opposite of relaxed. Working on the couch feels better at first, but using a laptop always involves contortions wherein either the screen is too close or the keyboard is too far. Wouldn’t it be great if I could have a screen floating before me at just the right position?

VR desktops like Immersed put you in an environment like this spaceship, or a mountain lodge, or a serene forest shrine, and project your computer’s screen before you. Stretch your screen to massive proportions if you’d like. If you want a standing desk, just stand up and take a few seconds to flick your monitors to the right height.

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Photograph: pixdeluxe/Getty Images

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The narrow stretch that separates Quay Tower from a thatch of bamboo and oaks in Brooklyn Bridge Park doesn’t look like much, especially in winter. Unless you’re a bird.

To a bird, the copper-colored building’s glass is a mirror, reflecting the thick grove of trees and suggesting that the wilderness continues across the road. To a bird, that can be a deadly mistake.

“You see that reflection? To a bird that looks like a tree, that is a tree, and they will go right for the tree,” says Catherine Quayle, social media director at the Wild Bird Fund.

The surprising uptake of birding as a pandemic hobby, along with social media and data collection tools like eBird and dBird, has created new visibility for bird collisions with glass, which kill as many as 1 billion birds in the U.S. per year. At the same time, a new generation of urban parks has given birds more places to roost in highly populated areas. But something else has followed these parks as well: real estate capital. The vogue for urban parks creates more economic impetus to build shiny buildings with big windows opposite those urban wetlands, glades, and groves.

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Illustrator: Cathryn Virginia

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First, it was Facebook, and then it was Twitter. In 2019, Twitter admitted that it allowed marketers to access the phone numbers that users had registered with the site. Many had given their numbers to enable two-factor authentication (2FA)—that process where a website sends you a text message to verify it’s really you who’s logging in. Users didn’t realize they were also allowing marketers to verify who they are in order to build better advertising profiles incorporating Twitter user data. (Twitter says this was an inadvertent mistake and that it has closed the hole.)

That’s especially scary because our phone numbers have become powerful tools to identify and track us, not just for companies but for anyone who wants to look up our personal information stored in a myriad of public records such as court filings, voter registration, real estate transactions, and marriage records.

Twitter’s admission is a nasty case of déjà vu since Facebook admitted to misusing phone numbers for ad targeting about a year before this article was written in 2019. “For a lot of people, [text-message authentication] is a totally reasonable protection that you should feel comfortable using,” says Gennie Gebhart, a researcher on consumer privacy and security at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But Facebook was irresponsible, and now we can’t have nice things.”

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Photo by Yagi Studio/Getty Images

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Illustration by Tung Chau

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Rulers must be healers, and good rulers will be so; they must study to unite their subjects, and not to widen the differences that are among them. Those only are fit for government that are of a meek, quiet, healing, spirit. They must also heal the wounds that are given to any of the interests of their people, by suitable applications.  Matthew Henry Commentary

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