Big Bother Is Watching
“Slack tracks and catalogs everything that passes through it, and that is supposed to be a perk. But if the little guy can find anything in the archive, so can his risk-mitigating boss.”
Outsmarted
A fantastic essay by Rick Perlstein, on the cult of “smart” in America and how it distorted the ideals of our democracy. “Even as we moderns spend enormous amounts of our conscious energy making evaluations about who is sophisticated and who is simple, who is well-bred and who is arriviste, and who is smart and who is dumb, these are entirely irrelevant to the only question that ends up mattering: who is decent and who is cruel.”
The Revolution Will Not Be Curated
From content to coffee beans to stylish, DIY scarves at the corner boutique, everything in America seems curated now, so how did the larger culture appropriate the job of an art gallery? And how does this process influence politics and our sense of truth?
Strangers in a Cruel Land
The wretched state of U.S. immigration enforcement, becoming more wretched by the day.
De-Muslimization
Writer Rafia Zakaria reports back on flying while Muslim after the U.S. travel ban.
The Slow Confiscation of Everything
Climate apocalypse: a coming calamity that’s morally different from nuclear exchange in a way we haven’t yet dealt with.
Holy Warriors Against the Welfare State
A trip to the DeVos seat of power in Michigan, home of evangelism and Amway.
Off Our Butts: How Smoking Bans Extinguish Solidarity
An impassioned essay on ways anti-smoking legislation is, and always has been, about social control — bans that target and dehumanize the poor in the name of public health.
Meltdown of the Phantom Snowflakes
“When I fight back, though, when I continue to write about injustice in the face of the bullying campaigns that are daily life for every female activist I have met, precisely when I feel strongest—that’s when I’m told I’m weak. A crybaby. Special snowflake. Whiner…
As politics turn darker, these slurs have become weaponized. Something bigger is going on.”
Trumped and Abandoned
The invective of Trump supporters inspires Susan Faludi to take a look back at the “Angry White Men” of the 1990s who felt disenfranchised, and threatened by women like First Lady Hillary Clinton—men like Mike McNulty, a Second Amendment activist and documentarian whom Faludi interviewed twenty years ago.