Having had local newspapers write about close family members of mine, I’d encourage you to reach out to freelance journalists and see if they’d be interested. They may do it for less compensation in exchange for the exclusivity of the story, and they typically bring other skills to the table that are useful when telling a person’s story (interviewing people, basic investigation, etc).
This is my general advice without knowing the details of what you’re after.
If you want an interesting dark view, try Blindsight by P. Watts. It's SF, but it's 10+ hard on Mohs scale of SF hardness, with 100 references to papers in the end. Contains a number of, mmm, interesting social vistas.
Since another replier gave a book for 100 years, here's one of those... http://ageofem.com/ Though I imagine 50 years has a small but non-zero probability in Prof Hanson's distribution, and he's pretty careful of not seeming overly certain: "Conditional on my key assumptions, I expect at least 30% of future situations to be usefully informed by my analysis. Unconditionally, I expect at least 10%."
I know it's a bit further out than 50 years, but I remember enjoying this book/series of essays that discusses what humanity could look like in 1,000,000 C.E.
Not quite the timescale you asked for, but The World in 2050 by Laurence C. Smith was an interesting read. At the time of writing he was predicting things about 40 years ahead.
If you're an emacs user, definitely check out org mode. Or if you've wanted an excuse to check out emacs, org mode may be a reason for you to make the move.
I use org-mode (with vim). It's low effort and anyone can see what I plan to do and submit changes with a pull request, without needing access to something other than the repository.
Speaking for myself, of course. TRAMP (especially with eshell and grep), IDO, magit, effortless buffer splits, org-mode, inline execution of elisp.
I am also rather used to the command set now. To the point that it just feels natural to jump around a file with emacs. ace-jump-mode is also good. Even something as simple as subword-mode is awesome.
Really, TRAMP has been the killer feature for me lately. The way it enhances grep results is ridiculously useful.
I like indent-region and the simplicity of C-x b to switch buffers.
I do think Atom has the potential to really go beyond what emacs has accomplished b/c more people know js/coffee than elisp, but emacs is also a moving target and has become a lot better than it was 10 years go.
My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about vim. All right, here is how I feel about vim:
If when you say vim you mean the antiquated relic, the impossibly-steep-learning-curve editor, the maddening modal machine, the most discouraging interface, which infuriates experienced users, confounds new users, and yea, literally takes the mouse from your hands and sets it on fire; if you mean the editor that takes every other editor and stomps them into the floor, shouting all the while, "I am better than you!" as you look on in total despair, then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say vim you mean the savior of efficiency, the feature-complete friend, the wise teacher, the universal helper, that is there no matter what the task, that asks only for your patience in return for life-long skill, that teaches new lessons right when you think you have mastered it, that frees you from reliance on the IDE and says, "rely only on yourself"; if you mean the tool that becomes a personal, intimate companion to anyone who has the fortitude to let it, then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.
I was thrown a bit when he say's "To code in Vim, you have to keep Vim in your head just as much as the code that you’re editing. You have to constantly think about what you’re doing." I have a few coworkers who work completely in vim while the rest of us use Visual Studio. I ask them questions about vim usage and usually they have to think a while about what they actually do because using vim is second nature to them.
I do not have to think about what I'm doing in vim, when it comes to normal text editing.
To be quite honest, getting up to normal-editor level with vim shouldn't take more than a month to become comfortable. Learning to move, yank, paste, and navigate windows is not hard and you really don't have to think about it.
More advanced usage I have to think about, but that's no different than if you had to think about what you were doing in sublime when you clicked search and replace and started typing in a regular expression.
It's a tough site to run because hundreds of thousands of people have write access to the database and reddit attempts to provide the millions of people reading the comments pages with up-to-the-fraction-of-a-second updates.
It's like running a tenth of a twitter with a 10k char limit, if twitter had 10 people on development/operations
I've anecdotally noticed an increase in stale pages lately as well, which I would guess is from more aggressive caching. For example, new submissions used to show up instantly, but on popular subreddits may now take a few minutes to show up on the New tab.
