Lindy West, The Guardian

Four years ago, out of morbid curiosity, I clicked on the homepage of a stranger who had been saying aggressive, repulsive things to me on Twitter, and found my way to his personal YouTube channel. I was relatively new to blogging on a national platform, and struggling to get my bearings in the thick of my first large-scale hate mob – hundreds of people flooding my social media feeds with cruel, frightening messages – in retaliation for what, exactly, I can’t even remember. I’d written something that some men didn’t like, and they felt the need, en masse, to shut me up. As a fat feminist, it happens to me all the time.

When the planes hit the towers on 11 September 2001, I was asleep in my dorm room in Los Angeles. The phone woke me – it was a friend, frantic, repeating, “Nine-one-one! Nine-one-one!” over and over. “Oh my god, nine-one-one! Turn on the TV!” Nine-one-one is the number for American emergency services; it was also, obviously, the date – a meaningless coincidence that nevertheless felt surreal and foreboding on that incomprehensible morning.

This past weekend, a massive photograph of Cecil the lion (the beloved animal whose illegal death at the hands of a dweeby American dentist inspired a global outpouring of grief) was projected on to the Empire State Building. The installation was part of a campaign to raise awareness about endangered animals – usually a fairly benign and uncontroversial cause (yes, alive lions good, dead lions bad) – that struck a sour, nearly satirical chord with many US activists. “I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care,” writer Roxane Gay tweeted last week .

What can you learn from talks about slavery, justice, space travel and 3D-printed robots? Lindy West joins the activists, dreamers and mysterious billionaires at this year’s TED conference in Vancouver

The University of Oklahoma announced this week that it has severed all ties and affiliations with the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity, after a video surfaced of frat members singing a racist chant . The video, which was released on Twitter by a campus black student alliance, shows SAE brothers on a bus, using the N-word and chanting, “You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me.”