Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
The efforts so far by most of social media haven't quite panned out as expected: Silicon Valley's coordinated purge of all things Infowars from social media has had an unexpected result; website traffic to Infowars.com has soared in the past week, according to Amazon's website ranking service Alexa. Well, that didn't work, not yet at least. …
Continue reading "Banning Infowars is Easier Said Than Done"
One can feel the panic come through the screen: Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is calling on other tech companies to ban more sites like InfoWars, and says the survival of American democracy depends on it. “Infowars is the tip of a giant iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and YouTube to …
Continue reading "“Survival of our Democracy” Depends Upon Who We Are"
I know this sounds a little dramatic, so an explanation is in order. I started on social media nine years ago, all the while continuing this and (later) the other blogs and websites. I've used several techniques to automatically disseminate these blog posts. I've always had a problem with doing every post manually. Keeping the …
Sometimes patience is required to solve a problem: Instead of venting, Mr. Musk — indeed, Silicon Valley as a whole — can perhaps see the Thai operation as a lesson. This was a most improbable rescue against the longest odds. Safely navigating 12 kids and one adult, many of whom were not swimmers, through a …
Continue reading "The Valuable Lesson Silicon Valley Needs to Learn from the Thai Rescue"
An interesting exchange between Sean Illing of Vox and Steven Brill yields this: Sean Illing The story of decline you tell really begins about 50 years ago, so is this basically a story of how a subset of the baby boomer generation drove the country off a cliff? Steven Brill That may be too much …
Continue reading "The Boomers (or at Least Some of Them) Really Did Tank This Country"
A British couple has won a course case based on the obvious, which is very difficult in the United States: A heterosexual couple who were denied the right to enter into a civil partnership have won their claim at the UK’s highest court that they have suffered discrimination. Justices at the supreme court unanimously found …
Continue reading "At Last, Some Good News on the (Non-)Marriage Front"
One, at least: Confidence is not something the 22-year-old Parker lacks. She’s the only student at UTC with Down syndrome, but its limitations are simply things for her to overcome, not hold her back. Although she usually has someone with her while she’s on campus, she’s unafraid to go it alone. Friends, family and teachers …
Continue reading "Yes, Down’s Syndrome Children can Go to College"
He's back in the saddle in Iraq, or at least working on it: On May 12, when Iraqis voted in the country’s latest parliamentary elections 15 years after the U.S. invasion, a new image of Sadr emerged: a smiling cleric with a snowy beard, holding up his ink-stained index finger after casting his ballot in …
Continue reading "Muqtada al-Sadr: Not a Reinvention After All"
Matthew Stewart's account of his holidays certainly resonates with some of us: For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in …
Continue reading "Laying Out American Inequality: The View from the Top"
Ryan Cooper at The Week is looking for a rehabilitation: Happy birthday to Karl Marx, who was born 200 years ago on May 5. He was the most astute and influential critic of capitalism in history — and also the most misunderstood. It is long since time that Marx re-joined the community of ordinary intellectuals, …
Continue reading "Karl Marx: Maybe too Cynical to be Demonized?"
