In January of 2019, I wrote a post asking if, thanks to the internet, we had achieved a state of maximum inescapable bullshit. But whether we were there almost two years ago, we are certainly there now. It took less than a decade for the internet—and, it turns out, mostly Facebook—to destroy American democracy. I know that’s fatalistic, but even ...
I’ll tell the story again. This blog began the day a friend of mine—a very smart one—shared an article on Facebook that was patently untrue. When I confronted him about this, he responded that he cared more about the “issue” than the veracity of the article. The double-take triggered by his cognitive dissonance led me to poke around and discover that the false ...
Many years ago while still in college, I was on the train to New York City—a beautiful ride along the eastern banks of the Hudson River. Several rows from me sat a family of American tourists who caught my attention when I heard the dad say, “Look kids, there’s Alcatraz.” Reasonably confident that Alcatraz sits on an island in San Francisco ...
When Black Panther opened last month and proceeded to set records at the box office, it just so happened to be 200 years, almost to the day, after Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Tuckahoe, Maryland. The significance of this particular symmetry might be observed through any number of lenses, including those distorted by presentist emotions, which tend to ...
A couple of posts ago, I reported that the organization Fight for the Future had facilitated enough comments sent to the Copyright Office regarding Section 512 of the DMCA that they “crashed” the servers. In a follow-up email brimming with pride, the organization said this to those who contributed: “Wow! In a matter of days you and nearly 100,000 other ...
