The Sad Implosion of Google’s Ethical A.I.
In December, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, fired Timnit Gebru, a celebrated artificial intelligence researcher and one of the most accomplished members of her field. Gebru, one of the few Black...
View ArticleAre We Ready for the Return of Mass Tourism?
It took a global pandemic for many of us to realize that we live in what Italian journalist and social theorist Marco D’Eramo calls the “Age of Tourism.” As he writes in his new book, The World in a...
View ArticleA Trial Can’t Bring Justice for George Floyd
On Sunday, the day before the opening of the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murdering George Floyd, protesters gathered around the county court building, in...
View ArticleHow Big Money Is Dividing American Catholicism
“This is what they have done,” Robert Busch writes with weary outrage as he forwards me a photograph of a group of nuns, one of them wearing a “Stop the Steal” button, cheerfully joining President...
View ArticleWhy Do Americans Have So Few Rights?
In 1991, Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon came out with Rights Talk, a warning that Americans had embraced a divisive understanding of rights that would lead the country into greater and greater...
View ArticleEnduring Lessons for Humanity After a Year of Birding, Hiking, Gardening, and...
July 12, 2020, is the day Flynn Murray became a birder. That’s when the 31-year-old Brooklynite left her dog at home, grabbed her binoculars, and made it her sole mission to immerse herself in the...
View ArticleRepublicans Aren’t Even Trying to Fight the Democrats’ Covid Relief Bill
Do Fox News viewers even know about the American Rescue Act, the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that passed the Senate? They might not. The network, like most right-wing media, has largely ignored the...
View ArticleJoe Manchin Decides Whether Biden’s Agenda Lives or Dies
In a series of interviews that aired this past weekend, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin offered progressives a glimmer of hope about the future of the Democratic legislative agenda. “There should be...
View ArticleThe Fossil Fuel Fight Isn’t Just in Congress—It’s in Your Kitchen
The fight over American fossil fuel dependency is upon us. Earlier this week, Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana put a hold on the full-chamber confirmation vote for President Biden’s pick for...
View ArticleGraham Greene Against the World
The last novelist who acted like he might save the world may have been Graham Greene. He belonged to a generation of writers who might not always share the same political opinions but who supported...
View ArticleInsurrectionist in Chief
In February’s Senate trial to impeach and convict Donald Trump for the crime of inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the modern GOP had one last shot at rescuing its long-battered...
View ArticleThis Is What the Beginning of a Climate-Labor Alliance Looks Like
Tuesday night, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act passed the House by 225–205 votes. If it passes the Senate and becomes law, it will peel back over half a century of anti-union policies,...
View ArticleTrophy Homes and $2.5 Million Tweets: How the Idle Rich Spent Their Pandemic...
Pity the newly rich, who are struggling with where to put their millions. According to a recent analysis cited by The New York Times, about 7,000 millionaires will emerge from the latest round of...
View ArticleWhy Republicans Won’t Shut Up About a 16-Year-Old Bipartisan Report on...
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a challenge of two voting rules in Arizona—one that bans most third parties from collecting absentee ballots and another that disqualifies...
View ArticleThe Underground Activists Who Fought for Freedom Across Asia
On an evening in June 1924, a French colonial official named Merlin narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. He was visiting the city of Canton, in southern China, from Indochina, where he was...
View ArticleWhat Is BuzzFeed Doing to HuffPost?
Tuesday was a beautiful day in New York City—60 degrees, cloudless, a perfect March day after a brutal February. At 10 a.m., right when the weather was getting very nice, management at BuzzFeed called...
View ArticleHow Big Tech Devours Public Space
In early February, Amazon released plans for its new corporate campus in Arlington, Virginia. The preliminary renderings show several generic glass office buildings clustered around a spire called “the...
View ArticleThe Year That Broke Care Work
A small guaranteed income is included in the new stimulus package approved by Congress on Wednesday afternoon. Starting around July, households earning $150,000 or less annually will receive monthly...
View ArticleWhat Will Life in America Be Like in 2022?
It’s September 2022, nearly three years after a mysterious virus began sweeping through China. In the United States, kids of all ages, newly vaccinated against Covid-19, are back in school, and their...
View ArticleHave Democrats Learned Their Lesson?
There is a rapidly consolidating consensus among the liberal commentariat that Democrats have learned from mistakes made during the Obama years and updated their thinking to adapt to new political...
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