Race and Social Panic at Haverford: A Case Study in Educational Dysfunction Not so long ago, one might have been able to count on the naturally oppositional reflexes of young adults as a counterbalance to this kind of crowdsourced social panic. Jonathan Kay 1 Dec 2020 · 23 min read
Relearning How to Read in the Age of Social Media People who don’t actively seek out books or articles inevitably lead more restricted lives because extended prose remains the most effective means of communicating complex ideas. Joe Nutt 30 Nov 2020 · 7 min read
The Life and Death of Unus Annus The project provided a unique and occasionally profound experience and a new perspective with which many of its fans had not engaged before—and all that from a YouTube channel! Nathan Eatwell 22 Nov 2020 · 7 min read
How Availability Cascades are Shaping our Politics Two components make up an availability cascade: an informational cascade and a reputational cascade. Vincent Harinam and David Kopel 26 Oct 2020 · 11 min read
Philosophy Is Being Hijacked by Woke Twitter Mobs Van Leeuwen and Herschbach wrote a statement on Facebook reiterating that the review process had been carried out properly, and declaring, “Efforts to silence unwelcome opinion… are doing a disservice to the community.” Nathan Cofnas 21 Oct 2020 · 6 min read
Lessons of the Pinker Affair: The Problem with the Academy is False Beliefs, Not Intolerance The correct response to the cancellers is not simply to say that they should respect free speech. Rather, one must say to them that you are attacking people for stating things which are true, while you are stating things which are false. Richard Hanania 16 Sep 2020 · 7 min read
Will Corporate Social-Justice Initiatives Be More Than Just a Fad? What’s different now is that the current strain of social-justice ideology presents itself as a totalizing creed—which means that it isn’t enough for CEOs to accede to the idea of social justice as a mere boundary check on the company’s profit-seeking activities. David Weitzner 31 Aug 2020 · 9 min read
At the NHS and BBC, Important Steps Toward Restoring Balance in the Gender Debate The fierce onslaught she received has served as a wake-up call, even for those who have not been following the debate closely. Julian Vigo 5 Aug 2020 · 10 min read
Journalism's Death by a Thousand Tweets Perhaps journalists don’t in fact like using Twitter any more than the average person, and their heavy use of the platform is simply a reflection of professional pressure coupled with its highly addictive nature. Thomas Moller-Nielsen 31 Jul 2020 · 12 min read
The Ever-Shrinking Transistor and the Invention of Google The developments of the search engine and social media follow the usual path of innovation: incremental, gradual, serendipitous, and inexorable; few eureka moments or sudden breakthroughs. Matt Ridley 15 Jun 2020 · 14 min read
Behind the Great Firewall For the most part, the Great Firewall (GFW) is irrelevant for the average Chinese citizen, mostly irrelevant for most Chinese netizens, and for many of the rest it protects their ability to make money. Thomas Brown 24 Jan 2020 · 11 min read
Streaming Will Never Be as Bad as Cable Some of these services will offer really good value to consumers, and those that don’t will quickly become irrelevant. Daniel Friedman 23 Jan 2020 · 7 min read
Glassdoor Is Broken In every instance there were detailed discussions about what’s missing and how to do better, delivered in a spirit of “hey, we’re not on a good path here.” Peter L. Levin 16 Jan 2020 · 11 min read
It’s Time to Pay for Social Media Breaking up the tech giants would interrupt the network effects that make their products so valuable in the first place. Tristan Flock 11 Jan 2020 · 7 min read
YouTube Censored My Interview With Posie Parker The subliminal message behind this is obvious: “Censor yourself so we don’t have to.” Konstantin Kisin 22 Nov 2019 · 4 min read