Since the Enlightenment, Western society has nurtured and celebrated the ideal of the autonomous self—the self-determined individual whose rights, freedoms, and personal ambitions are paramount. This cultural orientation, commonly labelled individualism, has often been portrayed as a triumph of…

Graphic: John Brockman, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvard University, Massachusetts. Photos: Getty Images. It’s alarming to see your name in the Epstein files, but I was braced to see mine. Years ago, I was part of a salon for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals called Edge founded by John Brockman. His…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The birthday-party invitation said “siblings welcome,” which means you can bring your 11-month-old son while your husband is out of town. You arrive a little disheveled and a little late. Your 5-year-old…

Sophia Rosenfeld is a distinguished historian and the author of Common Sense: A Political History. She discusses how the idea of “common sense” has been used as a political weapon, from Thomas Paine to Donald Trump. Rosenfeld explains how appeals to common sense can both empower ordinary people and…

After a lot of turmoil and their most vocal user base protesting about how Mozilla keeps pushing “AI” into the browser in many weird ways they now released the “AI Killswitch” they have been talking about for a while. Which is good. Those features should have been “opt-in” from the start and it’s…

There is a very simple political narrative, repeated ad nauseum, that goes something like this: The average American does not like “extreme” politicians of the right or left. As the right becomes more extreme, Democrats should “occupy the center lane,” offering “moderate” solutions with broad…

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests against raping children are leading to overdue demands that people not rape children, along with wider calls for greater avoidance of raping children across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy,…

In the wake of poet and writer Renee Good’s killing, Donald Trump and his collaborators have done all they can to define her as an enemy of The Homeland. The administration claims, for instance, that Good was a “domestic terrorist,” a term they are now applying to Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse whom…

Why has liberalism failed? That seems to be the great question of our age. One day it was a secure hegemonic force, it is claimed. The next, it was gone, an ascendant fascism filling the void in a ‘post-liberal’ world. ‘Why do people find the new right so much more compelling than you?’ we liberals…

The age of the sequel is over. Now it’s the age of the sequel to the sequel. Also the prequel, the reboot, the reunion, the revival, the remake, the spinoff and the stand-alone franchise-adjacent film. Canceled television shows are reinstated. Killed-off characters are resuscitated. Movies do not…

Thanks to a 2015 settlement to compensate the victims of thalidomide, Johanne Hébert was able to get a custom-built walker.Selena Phillips-Boyle/The Globe and Mail Please log in to bookmark this story.Log InCreate Free Account Susan Wagner-White splurged on a high-end Japanese bidet. Gavin Bamber…

For all of the professional gains women have made over the past several decades, one stubborn measure of inequality—the gender wage gap—has been especially difficult to stamp out. And it’s a disparity that can be traced in large part to parenthood. In nearly every country on Earth, the arrival of…

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let's talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs…

“I think you need to send that feedback to IKEA.” My friend H. thumbs the wheel of a Bic lighter until a long orange flame emerges from the opening, dances like a charmed snake. She dips her head to draw smoke through the stem of a short glass pipe and her phone’s fisheye lens stretches her…

Photo Booth Adrienne Salinger’s cult photography book from the nineties makes a comeback. July 26, 2025 “Kirk B., 16, Seattle, Washington, 1984.”Photographs by Adrienne Salinger When the photographer Adrienne Salinger first published her collection of portraits of teen-agers in their bedrooms,…

Liberals, socialists and mainstream conservatives all have distinctive “canons” of great authors. For liberals Locke, Wollstonecraft, Mill, Mills, Hayek, Rawls, and Nussbaum are all essential authors. Anyone committed to the free development of each and all draws upon Marx and Engels, alongside…

For most of the history of leftwing activism in Canada (or indeed, the world), it would have been impossible to imagine having a debate about tactics, strategies or goals among comrades that was held anonymously. There were no shrouds held up while people argued within meetings. Tactics may have…

Welcome to iPolitics’ Coast-to-Coast Check-In! With Parliament on summer holiday, we’re launching a new weekly interview series that profiles celebrated Canadians and gets their thoughts on the issues of the day. In our first edition, iPolitics caught up with David Suzuki, noted environmentalist and…

A recent leak of venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s group chats has revealed that he’s quite happy to see our university system destroyed if it will keep out foreigners and humiliate the elites who “actively discriminated against” people like him. The messages are at times quite shockingly racist…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. You could easily mistake Alec Harris for a spy or an escaped prisoner, given all of the tradecraft he devotes to being unfindable. Mail addressed to him goes to a UPS Store. To buy things online, he uses a…

Two nights ago, I deleted everything. Every note in Obsidian. Every half-baked atomic thought, every Zettelkasten slip, every carefully linked concept map. I deleted every Apple Note I’d synced since 2015. Every quote I’d ever highlighted. Every to-do list from every productivity system I’d ever…

The scourge of greige. (Shutterstock) For the last six years, I have been running the architecture blog McMansion Hell, which highlights the most ridiculous examples of bloated, nouveau riche residential architecture in the United States. When I began the blog in 2016, the Internet was rife with…

Photo-Illustration: Source Photograph: Isabella County Sheriff Office This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. 0:00 / 0:00 Audio: Listen to this article. One afternoon in January 2022, the parents of two freshmen at…

For roughly three decades, the JPEG has been the World Wide Web’s primary image format. But it wasn’t the one the Web started with. In fact, the first mainstream graphical browser, NCSA Mosaic, didn’t initially support inline JPEG files—just inline GIFs, along with a couple of other formats…

Presented to you in the form of unedited screenshots, the following is a ‘conversation’ I had with Chat GPT upon asking whether it could help me choose several of my own essays to link in a query letter I intended to send to an agent. What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal…

“My predictions about achieving full self-driving have been optimistic in the past,” Musk admitted to investors in 2023. “I’m the boy who cried FSD." He certainly has. Many times. Indeed, Musk has a long history of making outlandish promises and unfulfilled predictions about his businesses—and it's…

Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The article…

Refusing Tech Fascism May 14, 2025 by Fascism is on the rise. In Germany, in Europe, in the US, in India, all over the planet. The version of it that has been dominating for the last few years – especially the form it has taken in the US – has sometimes been called "Tech Fascism". Why should we talk…

I’m excited to publish this guest post by Nick McGreivy, a physicist who last year earned a PhD from Princeton. Nick used to be optimistic that AI could accelerate physics research. But when he tried to apply AI techniques to real physics problems the results were disappointing. I’ve written before…

Facebook Threads Bluesky Mail to Print page Submit a letter: Email us letters@nybooks.com Reviewed: The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli Verso, 264 pp., $24.95 (paper) Silicon Valley runs on novelty. It is sustained by the pursuit of what Michael…

The movement for corporate city states cannot believe its good luck. For years, it has been pushing the extreme notion that wealthy, tax-averse people should up and start their own high-tech fiefdoms, whether new countries on artificial islands in international waters (“seasteading”) or pro-business…

Bianca Wylie 10 min read· Feb 16, 2025 -- responding with slowness in relations In 2012, I did some of my first work as a facilitator to support a public engagement process for the Kay Gardner Beltline Park and Trail in Toronto. Through that work, I had one of my earliest experiences with what it…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. The Bar Is Closed A short drive from my home in North Carolina is a small Mexican restaurant, with several tables and four stools at a bar facing the kitchen. On a sweltering afternoon last summer, I walked in…

The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part due to a couple of Reddit nerds. Could they know what’s best for the auto industry better than the auto industry itself? The crusade against bright headlights has picked up speed in recent years, in large part…

Guest Essay May 18, 2025 Credit...Nadine Redlich Listen to this article · 7:00 min Learn more By Mr. Richards lives in Edinburgh and is the author of the forthcoming “Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark.” Leer en español How civilized to catch a train, enjoy a meal on board and…

(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) Opinion by Paul Waldman Paul Waldman Columnist covering politics EmailBioFollow Columnist Dec. 11, 2020 at 5:45 p.m. UTC If you were dropped in from another country without knowing anything about the United States and surveyed our current political moment, what…

Alphaville’s resident Tesla watcher is away on holidays, but Bethany McLean’s “He’s full of shit” drop in Vanity Fair last weekend about the House of Musk’s dubious SolarCity investments should not go ignored. According to Tesla much of McLean’s piece is erroneous. But frankly, we’re mainly…

In a fair society, there would be no billionaires. Bernie Sanders says they shouldn’t exist and Elizabeth Warren sells mugs of their tears. I’m talking about billionaires and making the case that an economic system that allows them is immoral. We have arrived at an obscene inequality crisis, in…

Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a…

Excerpted from “Just Say Yes,” by Bob McDonald. Copyright 2024. Published by Douglas & McIntyre. You probably have a photo album or drawer full of old pictures of yourself during a past era of your life, when your hair was a different colour and length, and your clothes were distinctive for the…