Hi all, Given that we could all probably use some right about now, I thought I would share a roundup of recent good news involving several of our members. Each shows the impact studies of computing are having not just within our field but on the broader public discourse. 1) Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, about the development of “digital redlining” and other racist online practices, was NYU’s bestselling book of the year and their top pick of all the books they’ve published this past decade. 2) Sarah Roberts’s recent book Behind the Screen, on the past, present, and future of commercial content moderation, was ranked one of the top 8 books of 2019 on privacy by BookAuthority. 3) Meryl Alper’s work on AI, bias, and disability discrimination was cited in Elizabeth Warren’s disability plan. You can read the coauthored paper, published by the AI Now Institute, here: https://ainowinstitute.org/disabilitybiasai-2019.pdf 4) Some good news of my own: Programmed Inequality received the 2019 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize in European History from the American Historical Association this weekend. 5) In job news: Whitney Pow, who works on queer and trans video game studies and computing history has accepted a full time job at NYU. Congrats Whitney! 5) Lastly, several books have recently added to the important, swiftly-growing body of work on Blackness and digital technologies, including André Brock’s Distributed Blackness, Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology, Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software, and Clyde Ford’s Think Black (about his and his father’s time at IBM). Feel free to add your own or others’ good news to the list. Best, Mar ______________________ Mar Hicks Associate Professor History of Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago, IL USA mhicks1@iit.edu | marhicks.com | @histoftech Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing www.programmedinequality.com