Story Stream
Breaking Up with Facebook March 20, 2025
“Sarah, come to bed.” Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s director of global public policy, is on a private plane from Zurich to San Francisco, traveling back from Davos with Sheryl Sandberg, her heroine and the chief operating officer of Facebook. Wynn-...
The Reading Life March 10, 2025
We live, largely, in a utilitarian world. This is not a state of affairs I welcome but it’s one, having survived the American educational system, I understand. Much of learning is framed in a fundamentally transactional way. What will this do for me?...
Against the Current February 02, 2024
On July 4, 1845, a man from Concord, Massachusetts, declared his own independence and went into the woods nearby. On the shore of a pond there, Henry David Thoreau built a small wooden cabin, which he would call home for two years, two months and two...
Hell Is Your Facebook Friends February 02, 2024
How will Facebook celebrate its 20th birthday? Perhaps it will create one of those cute video montages they like to generate at significant moments. Starting with a tinkling piano soundtrack, a couple of breathless friend requests, and some self-cons...
First-Gen Social Media Users Have Nowhere to Go November 07, 2023
A golden age of connectivity is ending. “I deleted my Facebook years ago, spend at least three to six months off Twitter every year, and Bluesky invites are just sitting in my inbox,” a friend tells me when I ask how her relationship to social media ...
Thinking Is Risky May 05, 2023
As the digital landscape undergoes a series of tectonic shifts—Twitter deflating, the rise of Substack, the collapse of Vice and Gawker—I have started to think about what has been missing in our previous round of online media and intellectual culture...
Covid Lab-Leak and the Attack on Common Sense May 04, 2023
Most of us learned about the virus we now call SARS-CoV-2 just over three years ago, on January 6, 2020. Reports of a fast-spreading respiratory infection that was hospitalizing and killing people in the southern Chinese city of Wuhan quickly became ...
Paul Schrader Wants to Make Another Movie May 02, 2023
Paul Schrader is seventy-six years old, compact, pugnacious. When production on his film “The Card Counter” was interrupted by the arrival of the pandemic, he took to Facebook and railed against the movie’s producers. “I would have shot through hellf...
Radical Dilettantism April 19, 2023
IN JANUARY, a viral tweet from @ricshatty arguably put the final nail in the coffin of a longstanding feminist trend. It reads: “enough girlbosses i need girlfailures. just an absolute loser of a female character. more women who suck!!!!!” The tweet ...
The Palo Alto System April 19, 2023
I met Malcolm Harris once, back in 2011. He was part of an escort of young activists who helped me navigate making a brief address, by means of a “human megaphone,” to the crowd at the People’s Library in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. I’d been living in...
Respectability Politics Works April 17, 2023
I first encountered the term “respectability politics” in 2016 when a local activist used it to defend herself against accusations that she was being “a bitch” on Facebook. Maybe you’ve heard this term from an annoying person in your community, or ha...
America's Censorship Regimes Goes on Trial April 12, 2023
Ernest Ramirez, a car-wash technician in a small, south Texas town, led a simple but fulfilling life with his son, Ernesto Junior. Junior was a “wonderful child, full of smiles.” Ramirez had raised his son alone; he’d never known his own father and s...
The Metaverse Is Quickly Turning Into the Meh-taverse March 29, 2023
The metaverse that was the hot thing in tech less than two years ago has cooled. Walt Disney Co. has shut down the division that was developing its metaverse strategies, The Wall Street Journal reported this week. Microsoft Corp. recently shut down a...
The Failures of Lean-In Feminism March 22, 2023
Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, in which the Facebook COO offers predominantly female readers gutsy, directive advice about how to approach their careers, is about to reach its tenth birth...
A $1,500 Book on "The Shining" March 22, 2023
FacebookTwitterShow more sharing optionsI can’t drive, so when I went to Oregon in 2016 I had to convince friends that borrowing a car to ascend Mt. Hood and see the Timberline Lodge would be “fun.” If the name’s unfamiliar, the hotel probably isn’t:...
How to Solve Big Tech Censorship February 22, 2023
Online speech is more heavily restricted than ever. A few large companies, which share a progressive bias, control what can be said on their platforms and curb the circulation of politically sensitive news, such as the New York Post’s 2020 report on ...
The Bitter End of 'Content' February 21, 2023
For reasons that are known only to God, for a couple weeks I reflexively watched Facebook Reels videos. It’s something like the bottom of the barrel for internet video, attached to a notoriously uncool social network that has devolved for almost ever...
Blame Palo Alto February 07, 2023
California can seem incoherent from top to bottom. From the south, there’s San Diego, a militarized pleasure dome that has quite effectively obscured obscene inequality with sunshine, sand, and SeaWorld. There’s Los Angeles, a gorgeous paragon of hea...
Peter Thiel on 'Anti-Anti-Anti-Anti Classical Liberalism' February 05, 2023
Peter Thiel is an American technology entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded PayPal and Palantir, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and has funded companies like LinkedIn and Yelp. Thiel also started the Thiel Foundation, which works t...
2022 Was the Year of the Metaverse—Until It Wasn’t January 04, 2023
What happened to “metaverse,” the distant runner-up to “goblin mode” with less than one-tenth of the votes? As recently as August, I could’ve sworn we’d never hear the end of the metaverse, the buzzword encapsulating the potential for a deeply embodi...
Life in the Metaverse November 24, 2022
Virtual Reality—be it Star Trek’s Holodeck or Ready Player One headsets—is an old staple of the imagined future. Pop on a headset and you can visit anywhere you like, real or fantastical. Want to walk around first-century Pompeii? See inside an atom?...
Surviving and Thriving in Tech's New Winter November 17, 2022
While tech’s new winter is no dot-com crash, the industry does appear to be entering an era of uncharacteristic austerity. Where teams aren’t already gutted, hiring is frozen, and budgets are slashed. Climbing interest rates have increased the cost o...
The Age of Social Media Is Ending November 11, 2022
It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twit...
The Case for a New Exceptionalism November 06, 2022
The following is an excerpt from the introduction to “Why America Matters,” published in October 2022 and available here.Many years ago, as a Gen X twenty-something and Rage Against the Machine fan, I would sing along to “Testify,” a song I recognize...
Zuckerberg: FBI Warned of Russian Disinformation August 26, 2022
Recently, I wrote about the disclosure of an alleged backchannel between the CDC and Twitter on censoring critics of the agency and its recommendations. Now, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed how …...
