1. The first cyberfeminist revolution.

"They coded. They built websites. They hung out in chat rooms and text-based online communities like ​LambdaMOO. They told stories through interactive code and experiences like the CD-ROM game All New Gen, in which a female protagonist fought to defeat a military-industrial data environment called “Big Daddy Mainframe.” They believed the web could be a space for fluid creative experimentation, a place to transform and create in collaboration with a global community of like-minded artists. Over twenty years later, in the many feminist conversations happening online, groups like VNS Matrix and their compatriots in the Cyberfeminist trenches are not frequently cited. They should be. Their spirit of joyful subversion is more relevant, more cannily timely, more totally necessary today than it has ever been.​" [Pocket]

2. Preventive medicine, a reconsideration.

"There’s a more fundamental issue. Risk factors and risk calculators are reminders that medical science does not completely understand the mechanisms of disease. Risk factors are associations; they don’t represent cause-and-effect relationships unless the connection to the disease is especially strong, like the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. Risk factors are based on averages taken from large groups, and consequently the individual patient can’t know his or her true probability of contracting the condition. For any population, the calculator could accurately forecast the number of, say, heart attacks over a 10-year period, but the algorithm can’t identify who will succumb and who will be spared." [Pocket]

3. The Uber Doctrine.

"Uber’s approach is brash and, so far, highly effective: It launches in local markets regardless of existing laws or regulations. It aims to build a large customer base as quickly as possible. When challenged, Uber rallies its users to pressure government officials, while unleashing its well-connected lobbyists to influence lawmakers. The company — which says its goal is to work with officials to change old laws that its executives argue don’t apply to a phone-app-based service — has carried out this approach repeatedly in cities and states across the country over the past year." [Pocket]

4. Overcoming our biological bodies, 18th-century French dentistry edition.

"One of the most famous of the new breed of dentists was Nicolas Dubois de Chémant. A Paris surgeon by training, Dubois had an epiphanic moment in 1788, as he reeled with horror after an evening spent in the company of a society lady with artificial teeth and very strong halitosis. Dubois hit on the idea of creating porcelain teeth rather than using the smelly and perishable human and animal teeth hitherto employed in dentures. Using the hard-paste porcelain that was only just coming into use in France, he launched a series of manufacturing trials for 'mineral dentures,' even drawing on the expertise of workers at the top-of-the-range porcelain factory at Sèvres to create a product that was comfortable, natural-looking, and resistant to surface cracking. By 1789, he had invented what became known as his 'Incorruptible Teeth,' and had had them approved by the most prestigious academies and learned societies.
" [Pocket]

5. On 'speculative archaeology.' 

"These archaeological projects serve to connect us to the material dimensions of our (often) virtual lives, to the deep histories beneath our presentist and futurist orientations and our 'innovation' obsessed enterprises; in the case of both Freeman and Lowe and Wexler, the work connects us also to the ontological roots of our contemporary spatial practices. Financial collapse, climate change, growing alarm about increasingly unsustainable processes of manufacturing, construction and waste disposal — to name just a few of the wicked problems which beset us — have also inspired some of these deeply historical, materialist approaches in art and design. The sensibility is longue durée and the emphasis is non-anthropocentric; and much of this work is undergirded by a strong sense of ethical responsibility and historical consciousness — it is self-consciously participating in a grand trajectory, which gives it a kind of gravitas. In this light we might see the New Archaeology as the new neo-classicism — but deeper. " [Pocket]

crabbed (two syllables) for perverse, irritable, goes back to the 14th c.

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Perishable Human and Animal Teeth Hitherto Employed