Society

Down below we have a lovely career-spanning essay on the music of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings and a review of their latest album Woodland. You'll need to be a paid subscriber to read it. You can also go directly to it here. Thank you for supporting this newsletter if

None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom

Another group of smirking techbros have decided that rich people shouldn't have to follow the same rules as the poors. There's an app for that. LineLeap, backed by Y Combinator, lets people pay to skip lines at bars. LineLeap makes money by charging Ticketmaster-style convenience fees for certain passes. The company also imposes fees for "newfound revenue" on venues -- that is, revenue that ...

They're the epitome of romance, glamour and status — but also have a dark side. A look at the many meanings of diamonds.

What started as an economic system has become an all-encompassing force. That wasn't inevitable. NPR's Throughline examines a project that has taken hundreds of years — and is still developing.

Companies have no way back from a sudden loss of trust

Revanchism is the political manifestation of the will to reverse the territorial losses which are incurred by a country, frequently after a war or after a social movement. As a term, revanchism originated in 1870s France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War among nationalists who wanted to avenge the French defeat and reclaim the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine.

The broadcaster said the tech bosses' companies had released "toxic particulates" into cultural life.

In a series of surveys, researchers studied when and why voters put up with inaccurate statements from their leaders.

PLDB: a Programming Language Database. Build the next great programming language.

Maroussia Lévesque considers "analog privilege" and what understanding it can tell us about the detrimental effects of AI systems.

Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff take apart widespread myths about Federal spending and debts.

From TikTok to Two Hot Takes, everyone sucks here.

Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars’s dead core? No? Well. It’s fine. I’m sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan […]

Thirteenth in the News Commons series. I grabbed the spottedhawk.org domain after hearing Garrison Keilor read this passage from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself over Leo Kottke improvising on g…

She homed in on a dangerous weakness.

Tariffs are a good example of the fact-free abandon of today’s Republican Party.

A high level recap of how European powers built out their empires in the century before the Great War.

A disconcerting review of how far private security, as in policing not supervised by a state, has gone in the US and abroad.

Two economists depict degrowth studies as analytically weak and advocating political infeasible ideas.

Wolf Ruck continues to assert his ‘right to rewild’ after city officials have twice forcibly cut his grass

The vice president says she is a gun owner. Here’s why it shouldn’t be a surprise.

Harvey Mansfield’s book on “manliness” prefigured JD Vance’s musings about “childless cat ladies” by nearly two decades.

The media is still pursuing the appearance of fairness by treating true and false, normal and outrageous, as equally valid

Lovable Mop-top Orgy Participants On July 26, 1968, Mick Jagger flew from Los Angeles to London for a birthday party thrown in his honor at a hip new Moroccan-style bar called the Vesuvio Club—“one of the best clubs London has ever seen,” remembered proprietor Tony Sanchez. Under black lights and beautiful tapestries, some of London’s […]

Less than a minute after the first words were exchanged between officers and Hill, an officer roughly pulled Hill from the car and forced him to the ground. Hill was cited for careless driving.

The sordid story of two ranchers who conspired to tamper with rain gauges on the Colorado-Kansas plains to get millions in false insurance claims