On the field at Jack Trice Stadium in Ames, Iowa, on Saturday, the long-standing football rivalry between the Iowa State Cyclones and the Iowa Hawkeyes was just kicking off.
Twitter has swapped the fluffy bird that used to symbolize the social media platform for a spindly black X. Ditching the company’s well-known logo and changing its name to a letter often associated with danger, death and the unknown is only the latest user-aggravating step CEO Elon Musk has taken since he bought Twitter in October 2022 for US$44 billion.
I felt compelled to nudge my now 11-year-old away from the Mattel mainstay for the same reasons I tried to avoid the shallow frivolity of all those Disney princesses waiting around to be rescued.
The model of democracy in the 1920s is sometimes called “the melting pot” – the dissolution of different cultures into an American soup. An update for the 2020s might be “open source,” where cultural mixing, sharing and collaborating can build bridges between people rather than create divides.