Kathy Book wrote goodbye notes to her husband, son and daughter last December 14, then walked behind her New Jersey home, into the woods, intending to kill herself. She survived, thanks to quick thinking by her husband and local police. (This story and accompanying podcast include extensive discussion of suicide. [Keep reading]
We’ve all had the maddening experience of being shuttled off to a mindless chatbot when we need real customer service help. Few things can raise your blood pressure like a nonsensical automated response designed as a stall tactic when you have a real crisis on your hands. I hope you [Keep reading]
Everything old is new again. There was a time when my parents taught me to be extremely careful with personal checks — never to leave open space in the amount fields, lest someone add a zero, for example. Over the past several years, check writing has fallen deeply out of [Keep reading]
Nearly two years after focusing the world’s attention on Big Tech’s big problems, Frances Haugen remains a powerful force in the technology industry. In today’s episode of Debugger, she tells me how Covid lockdowns played a key role in her difficult decision to come forward and criticize one of the [Keep reading]
Huntington, West Virginia has seen its share of tragedies. Nestled near the Kentucky border, Huntington is the home of Marshall University, which in the 1970s suffered one of the saddest disasters in the history of US sports. A charter flight carrying most of the school’s football team crashed on the [Keep reading]
Machines dehumanize people. I’ve long had a mental experiment in mind that I’d love to pull off one day — force people to walk at a grocery store the way they drive on a highway. You know: cut each other off, flip the bird, breathe (literally) down someone’s neck on [Keep reading]
It did keep plaguing me, you know, what really happened? Did they mix up his body? Did they lose his body? Little did I know what really happened. Really the horror, the nightmare was yet to come. I’ve hosted nearly 75 Perfect Scam podcasts during the past two years, but [Keep reading]
When Whistleblower Francis Haugen came forward and testified before Congress about what she thought was going wrong inside Facebook, she changed big tech forever. But how? I recently talked about this with Stephen Kohn, author of the book, Rules for Whistleblowers, A Handbook for Doing What’s Right, and many, many [Keep reading]
“I can tell you from a purely anecdotal standpoint, as a person who works with organizations that work with survivors of domestic abuse every day, that nearly everyone that they see who has come in … in addition to suffering what we think of as physical or emotional or mental [Keep reading]
Edit note: I’ve said sometimes that God is a journalist; it is quite remarkable how things line up sometimes in the storytelling business. I’m still in deep mourning over the loss of my pet Rusty, so it was with great unease that I began work on today’s podcast, about a [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan