Society

If this situation has you questioning whether anything you read on the internet is real, well, that's the right response to have.

This will be the last Friday you'll receive a Second Breakfast newsletter in 2024. I'm not writing my usual "year-in-review" series either, as easy as it could have been to just copy-and-paste "artificial intelligence" a thousand times over and call it good. Paid subscribers will continue to hear from me

By the end of World War II the world had changed forever, as nuclear weapons were used for the first and – to this date – only time in anger. Although the use of these weapons was barel…

Mysterious, misunderstood, and wholly underrated, the Concord is as delicious as it is fascinating.

Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce

This remarkably prescient document holds several lessons about how to run foreign policy.

Republican objections to these investigations tell us something about their cynical worldview.

Experiments by Anthropic and Redwood Research show how Anthropic's model, Claude, is capable of strategic deceit

The film’s representation of sex workers as deserving of respect is a quiet, radical act.

What do we mean when we talk about 'femicide'? Why is femicide linked to ecocide?

If you’re a Trump Voter, the Answer may Surprise you. What Trump Supporters think tariffs are For nearly a decade now, Donald Trump has been promoting tariffs as a tool of choice for solving America’s economic woes, at one point calling them “the greatest thing ever invented.” He has made them a central point of...

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.