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Mock Zuck, but Love Freedom January 23, 2025
I enjoyed Christine’s send-up of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent makeover and censorship-apology tour. Zuck is a powerful guy who wants to ingratiate himself with the new regime. But she’s missing a big part of the story: the FBI. The FBI is pretty powerful...
Making Space for Silence January 23, 2025
The most important moments of our lives happen in silence: in the development of life inside the womb; on the quiet walks when we have a flash of self-awareness and come to know something essential about ourselves for the first time; at the mysteriou...
Island Royalty January 22, 2025
Forty years ago, most white Americans had no idea that, hard on the heels of the American and French revolutions, an enslaved population on a Caribbean island had claimed its freedom by force of arms and founded a new Black nation called Haiti. Today...
We Also Need Democracy in Aesthetics January 21, 2025
In a new book entitled BACKBONE: Why American Populism Should Be Welcomed, Not Feared, author Karl Zinsmeister reports on middle Americans living all across the country, and why they want dramatic change in the direction of our country. He examines p...
Porn Is Inevitable January 16, 2025
American lawmakers are about to determine the future of pornography, or they’re trying, at least. In recent years, 19 states—most of them Republican-led—have passed legislation that requires any site with a significant amount of adult content to prov...
The Hipster Grifter Peaked Too Soon January 16, 2025
In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reported...
Don’t Mourn the Fact-Checkers January 10, 2025
The Great American Vibe Shift, rapidly reshaping U.S. culture and politics, has landed at 1 Hacker Way—the gleaming Palo Alto headquarters of Meta. In a video this week, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to content polic...
How to Storm and Save an Ivory Tower January 07, 2025
Not until quite recently did American colleges cease being free expression zones. After University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom sounded the alarm with his bestselling The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and...
Want to Be Happier? January 02, 2025
When Sahil Bloom went out for a drink one evening in 2021, his friend said something that upended his life: “You’re going to see your parents 15 more times before they die.”That calculation—based on his parents’ ages (mid-60s at the time) and his inf...
