Why Not Pink and Brown?
The unbearable whiteness of being....
Society & Culture
The Best Questions Are Not Good
“But, it would seem, there is no getting around explanations, we are constantly explaining and excusing ourselves; life itself, that inexplicable complex of being and feeling, demands explanations of us, those around us demand explanations, and in the end we ourselves demand explanations of ourselves, until in the end we…
Why the Line Between Coercion and Consent in Policing Eludes Us
The terms of the struggle are renegotiated every time a law is deemed unjust by civil disobedience, and the tension ratchets up every time we are forced to acknowledge that laws without the threat of possible force are no laws at all. The law may fix the line between coercion and consent, but in a democratic republic we at least have the prospect of that line moving forward or back.
How We Could Keep Holy
The tech bros must have stumbled onto Abraham Heschel’s book about the Sabbath.
How Tough Should Journalists (or Any of Us) Be?
Can truth be found gently? What about hope, and grit?
Moltbook: Social for a Different Species
There was still a note of excitement when OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy remarked that having more than 150,000 AI agents wired in and making their own posts on Moltbook was unprecedented. The next time I checked, there were more than 1.5 million.
What Are You Planning to Do with That?
For many college and university graduates, this is not a brief phase but a long-term reality, one that turns the job market into something that feels less like a promise and more like a gamble.
Our Gamified Lives
Duolingo. The best way to learn Spanish, right? Gamified so thoroughly that even I—who loathe competition in any form—got hooked. The characters were fun, and the constant invisible pressure had me coming home tired and rushing to do my Duolingo, worried that I would finish past midnight and lose my…
What the Pets of the Presidency Reveal
There are big political questions that prompt citizens to decide whether we agree with our president. But then there is the human question: what sort of person is this president? And what sort of person do the times allow him to be? One way to begin answering the human question…
The Coat You Wear to Fight, Spy, or Seduce
I have always wanted to be naked under a tightly cinched trench coat. Maybe the appeal is the contrast: soft, ready flesh, buttoned in and belted with military precision. I had never thought about this coat’s history until I read Trench Coat by Jane Tynan, part of Bloomsbury’s Object…