Society

No.338 — Without you, Patchwork is nothing ⊗ The rise of frictionless conformity ⊗ Science journalism becomes plain old journalism ⊗ Deliberate oxymorons ⊗ Trespassing for the Common Good

A year-long investigation by an indie journalist is a call to action

A pernicious myth

Once again, we’re back in the same situation as eight years ago. Since the nightmare on election night many, myself included, have been catastrophizing the possible scenarios beginning on January 20. We’re all aware of the awful threats from Trump and his agenda: Mass deportation. Attacks on reproductive freedom at the federal level. The use...

Coming off of some of the discussion of Gladiator II (I, II), this week I want to discuss the place of ‘bread and circuses’ in the narrative of Roman decadence and decline. This is one …

Sixteenth in the News Commons series. Dave Askins is shutting down the B Square Bulletin. This is tragic. And not just for Bloomington and Monroe County. (Dave covered the governing bodies of both …

His politics are so mysterious!

His politics are so mysterious! Stop us if you've heard this one before: a bigoted industrialist who owns a giant car company has endorsed a far-right German political party full of Nazis that aims to purify Europe by casting out groups of people it considers to be its lessers, if not downright subhuman. Ha ha, no, it's not Henry Ford, but we sure fooled you. We are of course speaking of Elon

Swisher believes the Amazon founder will eventually want to sell, since the paper has become a managerial nightmare.

Bezos can still be a hero in this story. But his only move is to sell.

The novel was a dominant art form last century from The Economist This century’s novelists will need to grapple with this shift. Writers in the last century benefited from increased literacy rates,…

In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More

I’ve been in the business of making new kinds of media companies, media platforms, and media technologies since before the Web was born, and in every case I’ve partnered with the advert…

I am a Tariff Man ,” declares President-elect Donald Trump. But wait! Won’t tariffs cause inflation? Yes, say the  Wall Street Journal  and ...

We yearn for frictionless technological solutions. But people talking to people is still the way that norms and standards change.

The World Happiness Report is a publication that contains articles and rankings of national happiness, based on respondent ratings of their own lives, which the report also correlates with various life factors.

The Democracy Index published by the Economist Group is an index measuring the quality of democracy across the world. This quantitative and comparative assessment is centrally concerned with democratic rights and democratic institutions. The methodology for assessing democracy used in this democracy index is according to Economist Intelligence Unit which is part of the Economist Group, a UK-based private company, which publishes the weekly newspaper The Economist. The index is based on 60 indicators grouped into five categories, measuring pluralism, civil liberties, and political culture. In addition to a numeric score and a ranking, the index categorizes each country into one of four regime types: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes. The first Democracy Index report was published in 2006. Reports were published every two years until 2010 and annually thereafter. The index includes 167 countries and territories, of which 166 are sovereign states and 164 are UN member states. Other democracy indices with similar assessments of the state of democracy include V-Dem Democracy indices or Bertelsmann Transformation Index.

The World Press Freedom Index (WPFI) is an annual ranking of countries compiled and published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) since 2002 based upon the non-governmental organization's own assessment of the countries' press freedom records in the previous year. It intends to reflect the degree of freedom that journalists, news organizations, and netizens have in each country, and the efforts made by authorities to respect this freedom. Reporters Without Borders is careful to note that the WPFI only deals with press freedom and does not measure the quality of journalism in the countries it assesses, nor does it look at human rights violations in general.

In 1970 everyone was feeling bad about the economy. How bad? To put a number to the pervasively negative vibe, Arthur Okun created the “mise...

Ecophagy is a term coined by Robert Freitas that means the consumption of an ecosystem. It derives from Greek  οἶκος (oikos) 'house, household' and  φαγεῖν (phagein) 'to eat'.

This piece was published in my book Lockdown in Hell World. It’s March and it’s sunny and quiet in my old neighborhood. Too quiet except for the birds. It feels like there’s a blizzard outside that you can’t see. Toward the end of February which is

We've lost sight of how absurd living like this actually is

Even people like this

About half of people have private health insurance through an employer. However, the other half get their insurance from elsewhere or through a combination of sources.

The largest nuclear weapon ever tested was Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton device detonated by the Soviet Union in 1961. That made it “3,300 times as powerful” as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — an almost unimaginable level of potential destructive

Claire V. Miller is a first-year student at Harvard College. In an opinion piece for the The Harvard Crimson , she writes that her fellow st...