Society

Several fires in California could cause billions in damage, further straining the state’s fragile insurance market.

Why did water hydrants run dry in the midst of a conflagration? City officials stressed that the shortage was due to low water pressure, not a complete…

Why the working class needs to make a hostile takeover of the Democrats.

On the prevalence of claims processing fraud by insurers and what if anything can be done about it.

Eighteenth in the New Commons series. Several generations ago, my pal Jerry and I were cutting a hole between the ceiling studs of a rented house in Durham, North Carolina. This was our first step …

Age verification laws designed to block children from online porn sites are sweeping the US, Io Dodds writes. But do they actually protect children, or is there another agenda at work?

What happens when you treat the world like a game of Risk.

Hey folks, Fireside this week! I’m currently working on a post “On the Gracchi” taking a somewhat darker look at everyone’s favorite Roman reformers (though hardly the same …

In Average Is Over, Tyler Cowen argues that the economy is becoming increasingly bifurcated.

Why did Twitter make my prefrontal cortex feel tight?

My wayward months as the best telemarketer in America.

The ongoing Israeli genocide compares to nothing in the history of Palestine.

Today Arvind Dilawar talks to someone in the West Bank about what life is like there now. “When you lay in your bed at night and you hear the planes and you know exactly a few minutes later someone will be killed…you don’t know what to do with

Apparently there’s been an "incident" at PowerSchool. An incident. A breach. A hack. NBD, just one of the largest ed-tech companies in the world, provider of a student information system for about 16,000 schools (75% of districts in the US), the central piece of digital infrastructure for K-12

By Laurence Boone, Boris Cournède, OECD Economics Department; and Marissa Plouin, OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs  Following a period when homele…

Learning from Finland’s success in combatting homelessness. “It is the result of a sustained, well-resourced national strategy […] which provides people experiencing homelessness with immediate, independent, permanent housing…̶

Why we’re publishing a previously undisclosed list of all 448 members of the Democratic National Committee

A conversation with Matthew Yglesias.

As Los Angeles burns, President-elect Donald Trump is yelling at a fish.

The real-life Los Angeles fires illustrate that the truly despicable villains in 2024's disaster blockbuster Twisters aren't the tornadoes.

If you want to be at the top of the food chain on Earth, as human beings have ascended to after millions of years of evolution, there are a bunch of

The cameras are coming. They're getting smaller and nothing will stop them. The only question is: who watches whom?

It is perhaps not sporting to be poking fun at moldering techno-optimism from 1996, from WiReD no less, but I'm going to do it anyway, because I suspect that Brin's article curdled as many brains as Barlow's asinine "declaration" did. The Internet was a mistake. The Transparent Society: The inhabitants of City Number Two know better. They realize that - out of doors at least - privacy has ...

Once again, this season's writers are a bit on the nose. She said they stopped and sat on Madison Street, north of Ogden Avenue, with the eagle for about a half hour after putting out the call for help. The raptor twice found enough energy to briefly fly, the second time into a wooded area where it was later found and captured by handlers from Midwest Bird Collision Monitors. "It definitely ...

I opened my annual predictions last week by noting that the technology industry had leapfrogged finance as the most powerful political force in the business world. But the news today that Meta is a…