Fletcherbetcher

Can I Touch You There? The future of wearable tech   So often in today's pontifications on the future we are provided a dystopian nightmare-scape of implanted micro-chips, roving gangs of murderous children, Mark Zuckerberg. It's terrifying stuff. Increasingly we live in a world of data. Our entire lives are compiled, sorted and sold in an endless stream of clicks, likes and scrolls. We have come to accept our lack of anonymity and privacy for the sake of more connectivity and better tuned content. Yet it seems, for the time being at least, we have levels of intrusion that we are not willing to accept. One needs only to look at the dismal failure that was Google Glass to see that. People hated the idea of other people being able to surreptitiously record interactions on a person to person basis. We may have accepted Big Brother, but it's smaller counterpart is perhaps a step too far.  But are we just postponing the inevitable? I think so. And I believe that it w...

Universality in gender is a concept that can at the same time be true, false, to that which we strive, and to that which we purposefully shun. What I mean to say is that it is a broad concept that has a multitude of meanings to a multitude of people. As many scientists have pointed out, at a biological level we are all essentially 50% men and 50% women. And I'm not talking about global dichotomies of the sexes, I'm saying each one of us carries those chromosomes around. In essence we are all born way more gender fluid than we give ourselves credit for. But then here like, comes society man and like totally ruins it (blows through a paper towel tube covered in drier sheets)  But it's true isn't it? In this crapshoot called life so much of our identity hinges on where the cosmos decides we're going to pop out. By that I mean that relatively little is determined in the womb regarding full realizations of gender or sexuality and instead it is our social conditioning ...

It is both fascinating and troubling to question why racism, with its well-earned historical stigma of wrongfulness and shame, continues to persist. It boggles the mind to think that here in America we have yet another wave of neo-nazis , a police force that targets minorities and gets away with it, a prison system that has essentially perfected legalized slavery and a series of on-going wars designed to subjugate and murder people of color. Yet here we are.   In the world of theatre, particularly as a means of livelihood and employment, white actors are hired much more frequently than minority actors. Entire seasons of equity houses might feature one or two minority actors, entire Broadway casts might feature 0 minority actors. Despite being a billion dollar industry, the Broadway league conveniently refrains from tracking minority casting figures, although they spend a great deal of energy tracking their audience demographics (spoiler alert: it's 85% white).  In...