In the ‘60s, the US federal government saw a need for a unified standard for digitally encoding information. Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 executive order on computer standards directed federal agencies to convert all of their databases to the new character encoding standard: the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII. While now a universal standard, records from the Central Intelligence Agency archives document decades of reluctance and frustration from the technicians actually responsible for making the change happen.

The tech-filled San Francisco Bay Area bidded on Amazon’s second headquarters, without giving much attention to how much that headquarters would gentrify some of the last remaining affordable spaces in the Bay.

Lists of banned books acquired by MuckRock through public records requests show that Ohio and Michigan prisons ban books that aim to teach computer programming skills. Their decisions to ban educational texts related to programming, alongside erotica and literature published by neo-nazi groups, are in stark contrast with practices in other states and countries, where prisons include coding in educational programs.