Reading Time: 5 minutes This week, amid surging Ukrainian drone strikes against Russia, Europe’s largest wildfire (yet), and the racist massacre of three Black citizens in Florida, a US veteran died of pancreatic cancer. He was 49 years old. Because he had put himself in the political spotlight, and because he had stayed there despite significant holes in his […]
editor’s pick
Posted inBooks
Book curses and book blessings
Reading Time: 5 minutes When books were rare and precious objects, their owners protected them with curses to deter thieves and vandals. We should adopt that same attitude of repugnance toward modern-day censors.
Posted inPolitics
Ammon Bundy knows why Republican politicians lie: It works like a charm
Reading Time: 11 minutes Scholars have long known that conservative politics and media distort and mischaracterize reality. This distorted reality insulates right-wing media consumers from contradictions and challenges to their beliefs. As a means to power, conservative politicians see this as a feature, not a bug.
Posted inCritical thinking
Meet the Fab Five of misleading information
Reading Time: 8 minutes Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation abound in media, government, and everyday interactions, but they’re not the only misleading games in town. We also have to deal with truthiness and just-so stories. Together, this “fab five” of false forms can mislead us into thinking we have a greater lock on the facts than we do.
Posted inEconomics
Taylor’s truckers and the sweating of the 1%
Reading Time: 6 minutes This tour will be remembered for one thing: Swift’s decision to pay everyone associated with it life-changingly large bonuses. It’s the kind of thing that gets other proletarians eyeing their own Romanovs.
Posted inTechnology
Our AI future: What AI can and (probably) can’t do
Reading Time: 6 minutes The wildest claims about AI—both the optimistic and the pessimistic ones—are unlikely to come true. However, the technology has genuine potential both to liberate humans from toil, or to allow greed and bias to run wild. The solutions we need aren’t sci-fi constructs like Asimov’s three laws, but better laws and policies to guide the technology down beneficial paths.
Posted inClimate Crisis
Climate change solutions: It’s a voting thing, and that’s a worry
Reading Time: 5 minutes In a summer of broken records, it is hard not to sound like a broken record, but… Last month was the hottest June ever recorded on this planet. That really is worth emphasizing, since we have had a number of record-breaking years and months over the last 20 years. To couch the statistics in another […]
Posted inPolitics
Beyond warring narratives: The struggle for US democracy
Reading Time: 7 minutes US news has found two incompatible ways to talk about threats to democracy. Is the US is on the verge of losing its democracy if Trump takes office in 2025? Or is he the savior of that democracy, rescuing it from liberals run amok? Missing from the conversation is a deeper way of returning to normal civic discourse.
Posted inWar and Peace
The morality of cluster bombs in the perverse logic of war
Reading Time: 4 minutes Cluster bombs are terrible weapons which endanger civilians long after hostilities have ended. But they may be the swiftest way to defeat Russia and end the Ukraine war, which will save more lives overall.
Posted inClimate Crisis
Meet ‘creation care,’ the evangelical substitute for environmental activism
Reading Time: 14 minutes Christianese does a lot of heavy lifting for evangelicals. Everyday life becomes a godly melodrama. You aren’t the guy who carries the pastor’s stuff—you’re an armorbearer. You aren’t eating lunch, you’re breaking bread. Even a simple word-shuffle like Christ Jesus can give an insidery zhuzh to whatever you’re on about. The result can be a […]