Archive: Year: 2022

No, and Jonathan Haidt’s big new Atlantic essay about social media’s damaging effects couldn’t be more wrong about what ails usMembers of the Missouri Student Association registering students to vote, Columbia, Mo., on Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012, National Voter Registration Day (KOMU News)Jonathan Haidt, the New York University social psychologist and author of the bestselling book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, has been on a tear for a while about the negative effects of online social media. Three years ago in The Atlantic, he and co-author Tobias Rose-Stockwell wrote an essay arguing that the public discourse was getting more coarse and less civil because of how social media “turns so much communication into a public...

Letting lobbyists for military contractors like William Cohen opine as if they are objective experts, that’s how.I don’t watch a lot of cable news, mostly because it just makes me agitated. At night, most of the coverage isn’t really news but opinion and entertainment delivered as news. So instead of learning from people who actually know something about the events being covered, the cable programs center on anchors who are mostly skilled at emoting, building a connection with their viewers, and guests who help narrate whatever spectacle we are being offered to draw our attention. (Well, maybe Chris Hayes is an exception.)But cable news still has a big impact on public opinion, because the people who watch think they’re well informed,...

Why aren’t there more Wikipedia-scale successes online?The NY Public Library Manhattan main branch, inside Planet MinecraftOn Monday night, I participated in a class session of Technology, Media & Democracy, a partnership of five academic institutions in New York City, co-taught by Justin Hendrix, combining two classes he runs at NYU and Cornell Tech, David Carroll at The New School, Douglas Rushkoff at CUNY Queens College, and Emily Bell at Columbia Journalism. Alongside me as speakers were Rebecca MacKinnon of the Wikimedia Foundation and Eli Pariser of New_ Public.Rushkoff sent us some questions in advance, which got me thinking. In essence, he asked us to consider the challenges facing democracy today, to weigh how much tech has contributed to those challenges...

A week after workers at its giant Staten Island warehouse voted to unionize, I went for a closer look.Amazon Labor Union organizers press conference, April 8, 2021 (Photo by Micah L. Sifry, all rights reserved)Late Friday afternoon, I got in my car and drove from my home in lower Westchester County to Staten Island, to attend a press conference by the Amazon Labor Union outside the JFK8 warehouse where they got their start. It took 90 minutes to make it down the West Side Highway to the George Washington Bridge and through the never-ending traffic of the New Jersey Turnpike until I reached the exit for the Goethals Bridge to Staten Island. I fretted about getting lost and missing the...

The Amazon Labor Union could use your help.Dear MacKenzie Scott:I am writing you with a modest proposal. Give the Amazon Labor Union a million dollars.You have already done many admirable things with your money, giving away more than $12.4 billion since you started fulfilling your Giving Pledge in 2019. You have been clear, in your own writing, that you want to use your resources to support “powerful levers for change.” You have declared your “conviction that people who experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions.” You have chosen to prioritize organizations run by leaders of color.You have told us that you are “governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not...

Why are members of the Sedition Caucus rewarded with millions in earmarks for their districts?Chad Fennell, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia CommonsOurs is a government of laws, not of men, John Adams once said. Well, is it? That is the question presented by January 6th, 2021, which federal judge David Carter ruled on Monday was “a coup in search of a legal theory” to justify itself. Judge Carter was deciding whether Chapman University could be compelled to hand over to Congress emails sent by its law school dean John Eastman, who was advising President Trump on how to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election, not whether Trump himself had broken the law. But that question required that he...

Are we all too distracted by spectacle to take any meaningful action to prevent a dangerous escalation over Ukraine?Slim Pickens riding a nuclear warhead to certain Armageddon in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire Dr. StrangeloveWhen media critic Neil Postman wrote his book Amusing Ourselves To Death, he couldn’t have known that the very week that the world’s two greatest nuclear powers lurched closer to full-scale war, much of our attention would instead be focusing on a spat between two famous actors at the Oscars. Right now, far more people are aware of the fact that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for telling a disrespectful joke about his wife than know that Russian generals have rebuffed repeated efforts by their American counterparts to...

If you think Democrats are due for a shellacking, here’s why you could be wrong.The 2022 mid-term elections for Congress will be pivotal for America. If history is any guide, the Biden White House will lose control of the House of Representatives and possibly also the Senate. The mid-term electorate almost always is made up of more voters who fear the power of the party that controls the White House than those who support it. Current polls show that people who identify as Republicans are strongly motivated to vote this fall, while many Democrats — especially younger voters — are unenthusiastic, choosing to focus on the things Democrats promised but failed to deliver. The only times in recent history when this general tendency failed to...

How the former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador, who died this week, failed the test of historyFormer Secretary of State Madeleine Albright speaking at the “Pass the Baton” event in Washington, D.C. (2009, photo by dbking https://www.flickr.com/photos/65193799@N00)In May 1996, on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl asked then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the ongoing economic sanctions that the United Nations, led by the US, had imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in response to his illegal invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The sanctions banned nearly all trade with Iraq until it rid itself permanently and unconditionally of all nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons capabilities and allowed inspectors full access to verify and monitor compliance. At the time of the interview, it...

Americans are hyperstressed by current events; will we turn private pain into public solutions?Photo by Joshua Earle on UnsplashYesterday was the Spring Equinox, the moment in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun when day and night are equal around the world, the Sun appears to cross the equator, and sunrise and sunset take place at due east and due west. If you were on the North Pole, the Sun floated along the horizon for the full 24 hours and dawn and dusk merged. It is a day of equipoise, when children are encouraged to balance eggs standing up (something you can in fact do at any time of the year), and for many cultures a time to mark transitions, spiritual and...