The Future We Lost
We lost our chance to build the future. Those opportunities don’t come along every day, and we may not see another.
Category: Culture
Autumn in Griftopia
There is a sick symmetry to Kolfage’s scam. Fourteen years ago he was literally blown to pieces in a war that was, itself, a trillion-dollar con.
Max Boot Upgrades His Network
In time, we’ll likely recognize malformed social networks as a problem on par with income inequality or rural poverty. Ironically, the same social media technologies that helped create this problem probably hold our most promising solutions.
What It Means to ‘Believe Women’: The Kavanaugh Choice
Believing women does not mean setting aside critical thought. It means confronting our own inconvenience.
Joseph Campbell on Netflix
Forty years ago, PBS released a series of Bill Moyers’ conversations with professor Joseph Campbell, who is famous research on mythology. Netflix has commemorated this anniversary by making the series available on their streaming service.
What It Means To Be An American
Our greatest dreams are our most dangerous, our most volatile. No one said the dream would be cheap.
Boredom, a Eulogy
Boredom has disappeared from our lives and with it, the ingenuity it spawned.
Bribery Is An American Tradition
Our government is for sale, but don’t blame Donald Trump. His clumsy cast of cartoon Mafiosi have merely taken the finesse out of the game, placing the oily guts of the machine out in the daylight.
‘Free Speech’ Won’t Rescue Dumb Ideas
Neither the 1st Amendment, nor any moral or intellectual notion of free speech grants me a right to be taken seriously. No one has a 1st Amendment right to appear in a particular media platform. No one has a 1st Amendment right to be invited to speak on campus, be interviewed on TV, teach a class in a university, or get a featured column in The Atlantic. Freedom of speech is not equality of ideas.
Fake news highlights the instability of monocultures
Diversity is about more than the humane tolerance of others, it is an evolutionary imperative. We will master a world of looser, more diverse cultural ties, or fall behind those who do.