One of the problems we face in the war against terror is that al-Qaeda is not quite a conspiracy in the traditional sense. It’s something else that is more difficult to characterize and target. (I wrote what follows three years before 9/11.) Political and occult conspiracy theories can make for good…

L ast week, multiple major Internet corporations essentially cooperated to kick a hate site, The Daily Stormer, off the Internet . Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Google, and various other companies withdrew their services, and now one of the Internet’s most odious sites lives mainly on the “dark web,” largely…

Illustration by Jon Han White supremacist marchers had not yet lit their torches when the deletions began. The ‘‘Unite the Right’’ Facebook page, which had been used to organize the rally in Charlottesville, was removed the day before the event was scheduled, forcing planners to disperse to other…

[Content warning: discussion of racism. Comments are turned off due to bad experience with the comments on this kind of material.] I. A set of questions, hopefully confusing: Alice is a white stay-at-home mother who is moving to a new neighborhood. One of the neighborhoods in her city is mostly…

Even for those with an understanding of cryptocurrencies, Ethereum and other advanced open blockchain networks can be confusing, especially when people start talking about launching their new cryptocurrency or token on top of Ethereum. How can one valuable digital item “run” or “be launched” on top…

1 In the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, the most crowded city in one of the most densely packed countries in the Western Hemisphere, class and elevation are inextricably linked. The city was founded on the coast, at the foot of the Chaîne de la Selle mountains, and over the centuries spread…

Home DataPoints The Value of Empirical Economics A free and open conversation on the economy and other things. The Value of Empirical Economics Alert Share | By The value of empirical economics is hotly debated, especially in the aftermath of a largely unpredicted Great Recession. Economist Russ…

Imagine your worst ideological enemy– the people whose blog posts you read and go “why are you WRONG about EVERYTHING.” For many transhumanists, it might be bioethicists; for a disability rights advocate, Peter Singer; for an effective altruist, a philanthrolocalist; for a feminist, a social…

A journalist once asked me how many jobs NAFTA had created or destroyed. I told him I had no reliable idea. Certainly jobs had been lost when factories closed and moved to Mexico but other jobs had been gained because Americans now had more resources and increased their demand for products that…

I look into the page and I know what they want. Need radiates, hundreds of eyes lap up white static in the future their desire creates. The paths of my fingers on the keyboard can be traced according to possibility, a reticulation of potential directly influenced by their gaze. Like autocorrect, but…

Context: Multiple friends of mine have recently (independently) reported to me that they feel like they’re under conversational attack. Multiple friends have also independently told me that they are starting to doubt that their conversation partners are well-intentioned. I’m not particularly…

Roger Stone has worked with Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater, and on the Florida recount. Credit Photographs by Platon A sign inside the front door of Miami Velvet, a night club of sorts in a warehouse-style building a few minutes from the airport, states, “If sexual activity offends you in any way, do…

I was, frankly, amazed when I saw this tweet: Let me remind you that Washington Post Editor-in-Chief Marty Baron’s industry — newspapers — is one without a business model (Baron’s newspaper is more fortunate than most in its reliance on a billionaire’s largesse). Said lack of business model is…

Like the best marketing terms, “vanlife” is both highly specific and expansive. Credit Photograph by Jeff Minton for The New Yorker Emily King and Corey Smith had been dating for five months when they took a trip to Central America, in February, 2012. At a surf resort in Nicaragua, Smith helped a…

How quick we are to move from “Trump is evil, dangerous, and incompetent” to “I trust him to conduct war operations against Syria.” — David Auerbach (@AuerbachKeller) April 6, 2017 How far we are from a month ago. One of the reasons I started writing these entries, and probably the main reason, was…

In the previous diary I wrote about the pseudonormalization of Trump over the last month. What I gave was only half of the story. I didn’t explore the sheer significance of the administration’s marginalization of Steve Bannon. Bannon’s demotion and marginalization is indeed a key part of what allows…

A pril 22, 2007. It was a landmark day for YouTube as University of Minnesota graduate student, Adam Bahner — going by the moniker “Tay Zonday” — decided to upload an original music video titled “Chocolate Rain.” ​Ten years later, “Chocolate Rain” has garnered over 112 million views and still…

Chinese 100 yuan bills. (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg) The economic history of the last 40 years can be summed up in four words: “before China” and “after China.” Before China opened up, the world's center of economic gravity was on the Atlantic. After China did, that started migrating toward the…

To show off the secret behind Pharma­packs , his $70 million retail business, Andrew Vagenas picked up an EOS lip balm and tossed it to his buddy Brad Tramunti. "Watch," Vagenas said. "He's like a special kid." There is nothing about Tramunti that makes you think: lip-balm guy. He's 33 years old and…

From Inside Higher Ed : a group of Harvard students is going to raise awareness of free speech by inviting controversial speakers like Charles Murray and Jordan Petersen to their school. I strongly believe that if somebody wants to hear Charles Murray or Jordan Peterson speak, then they should have…

Here are two things that I believe to be true: Bigoted ideas about fundamental intellectual inequalities between demographic groups are wrong. Black people aren’t less intelligent than white, women aren’t bad at science, Asian people do not have natural facility for math, etc. Genetics play a…

Good morning, Happy Tomb-Sweeping Day (well, technically, Tomb-Sweeping Day is tomorrow, but the Taiwanese government changed the observance to yesterday so that folks could have a long weekend in conjunction with today’s Children’s Day, which itself is scheduled on April 4th such that it can be…

[Content note: kind of talking around Trump supporters and similar groups as if they’re not there.] I. Tim Harford writes The Problem With Facts, which uses Brexit and Trump as jumping-off points to argue that people are mostly impervious to facts and resistant to logic: All this adds up to a…

I’d like to pretend that the long silence since my last proper post — that was November last year — has been due to the long queue of contributions we’ve been briskly working through, but truth be told, I’ve been sulking. Sulking . Not depressed, fearful, angsty, or anxious. Sulking is really the…

Perhaps the most impressive (and measurable) achievement of technological modernity has been the drastic reduction in infectious disease mortality. It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of this victory. It is one thing to say that half, or a third, or a quarter of children used to die before…

[Content note: scrupulosity and self-esteem triggers, IQ, brief discussion of weight and dieting. Not good for growth mindset.] I. I sometimes blog about research into IQ and human intelligence. I think most readers of this blog already know IQ is 50% to 80% heritable, and that it’s so important for…

American presidential campaigns, we have rediscovered, are not in good faith. They are more performance than policy. They manipulate the media rather than articulate a philosophy of governance. The candidates are brands, and the debates have almost no discussion of ideas or positions, let alone much…

Or “Contra A Convergence Of Far-Left and Far-Right Twitter Making Fun Of The Same People”. I’ll mostly be using Current Affairs articles as foils, not because they’re especially bad, but because they’re especially good and well-written expressions of what many other people are saying. This is a…

Welcome to your future. Kremlin photo The U.S. media landscape is about to get a lot weirder by MATTHEW GAULT The Hollywood Reporter published a profile of Stephen K. Bannon on Nov. 18 that set off a minor Internet shit storm. “Darkness is good,” Bannon, the chief strategist for president-elect…

Illustration by Javier Jaén In January, BuzzFeed News published a dossier full of sensational and unverified claims compiled by a former British intelligence agent,which described extensive connections between President Trump and the Russian government. Trump responded, as expected, with a tweet. He…

Exposition (plus an example exculpating exports) Trump won the election, and people are blaming polarization. WSJ – Trump benefited from polarization , Global Research – polarization made Trump unavoidable , Reason – Trump won because of the PC culture war , Guardian – Did fake news and polarized…

Oscar Wilde, who knew a few things about censorship, once wrote that he could "tolerate everything except intolerance". Today, the rhetoric of free speech is being abused in order to shut down dissent and facilitate bigotry. On behalf of everyone with liberal tendencies, I’d like to know why and how…

When people look back at the decline of old empires and dynastic systems, its almost always to use them as a cautionary tale of how going against the author’s preferred set of political, cultural, and moral preferences inevitably leads to disaster. That temptation is obviously hard to resist. After…

[Content warning: Holocaust. This is a complicated and emotional subject and I make no claims to know much more than what I read in the book, nor to be 100% certain I am representing Arendt’s views faithfully.] I. For Holocaust Remembrance Day last week I read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann In Jerusalem…

I’m relieved that the weather is unseasonably warm on the day I meet Cat Marnell, because it means I can wear my vintage fake-leopard jacket and not my North Face Brooklyn Mom sleeping-bag coat. From reading her new memoir, How to Murder Your Life , with its Bret Easton Ellis–style litanies of…

When I first watched Mad Max: Fury Road one particular line stood out at me, and I don’t think it was by accident: “Everyone in the old world had a show.” We live in a brand new era of user created content and YouTube has been one of the flagship websites to enable it. With a $20 webcam – or hell,…

Even technology that seems to exist only as data on a server rests on tedious and potentially dangerous human labor. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY ERICH HARTMANN / MAGNUM Henry Soto worked for Microsoft’s online-safety team, in Seattle, for eight years. He reviewed objectionable material on Microsoft’s…

STANFORD – One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a “post-fact” world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance. The emergence of…

AP Photo With the stroke of a pen, the president has seriously jeopardized America’s safety and standing. By Daniel Benjamin With his executive action suspending the admission of refugees to the United States and temporarily halting the entry of citizens from a variety of Muslim countries, President…

I. I got to talk to some AI researchers last week, and they emphasized how surprised everyone had been by recent progress in the field. They all agreed on why they were surprised: the “AI winters”, two (or so) past episodes when AI hype got out of control and led to an embarrassing failure to meet…