President Donald Trump infamously labeled the press the “enemy of the people” and routinely suggested that negative stories about him were invented out of whole cloth by “nasty” reporters who were out to get him. But the extent of his administration’s assault on the press is only just coming into view.
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For years, Facebook has had two sets of rules—if not more—for its users. One set applied to everyday people on its platform: your mom, your friend doing low-key MLM scams, that guy you knew in high school who got really into guns. While some of these regulations weren’t publicly shared—and may have varied between markets—others were more clear: prohibitions against hate speech, threats of violence, nudity. Violate them, and you were likely to be suspended or even banned, with little recourse.... Читать дальше...
United Airlines announced this week that it will purchase at least 15 supersonic Overture jets, at $200 million a pop, from a startup called Boom, which—having yet to put a single one of its fast new planes in the sky—aims to start ferrying loads of up to 88 business-class passengers between major cities by the end of the decade. The International Council on Clean Transportation, or ICCT, estimates that supersonic jets are five to seven times as carbon-intensive as traditional planes. Improbably... Читать дальше...
As Israel prepared to remove Palestinian families to make way for settlers in East Jerusalem, and launched airstrikes on Gaza that demolished homes and killed hundreds of Palestinians, including scores of children, Democrats in Washington experienced what one pollster called a “tectonic” shift. Newly elected representatives such as Cori Bush and Marie Newman were calling attention to American complicity in Israeli practices. Even more traditionally pro-Israel senators, such as Bob Menendez and Chris Coons... Читать дальше...
It cannot be said enough that—beyond installing Federalist Society–approved judges and lowering taxes for corporations and the rich—today’s Republican Party simply has no ideas and no intent to govern. Needing an explanation for why its constituents’ lives are getting worse, it turns to regurgitated culture-war rhetoric—tyrannical, gun-taking socialist Democrats, Big Tech censorship, Hollywood’s reputed obscenities, trans women and girls in sports, gender-neutral potatoheads. You get the idea.
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An unnamed Democratic congressional aide told The Washington Post this week that the mood in his party is “panic.” The cause of that panic is a raft of legislation in various Republican-controlled states that’s designed to limit voters’ access to the polls. These laws are genuine cause for concern, but their most common component—restrictions on mail-in balloting—will likely harm Republican candidates more than Democratic ones.
There’s a scene in the 2011 film Moneyball where Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane is mentoring young Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) on how to cut a professional baseball player from the roster: bluntly, without euphemism. “Would you rather,” he asks, “get one shot in the head or five in the chest and bleed to death?” Imagine, if you will, that this was not a rhetorical question or an analogy about firing someone but rather a serious, literal question. Now imagine 206 pages of this, and you have a sense of what it’s like to read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book.
Not so long ago, you could be forgiven for thinking of Bill Gates as the good tech billionaire. Microsoft, the software company he co-founded in 1975, was a juggernaut, but hardly the big bad of the business world; Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google had all surpassed it as symbols of technology’s malign influence. And while other tech CEOs, such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, could be mistaken for supervillains—albeit somewhat nerdy ones—Gates cast the same image he always had: Slight, awkward, and somewhat goofy, he was a classic dork. Читать дальше...
