Posts:
By L. Finch We’re living in a golden age for dystopian fiction, or so the critics say. Our pages and screens are filled with tyrannical governments, tech slavery, and surveillance run amok — dark imaginings of a society where the arm of injustice is inventive and...
By Kevin Koenig In the past six months, former President Correa's handpicked successor Lenin Moreno has brought back the unpredictability for which Ecuadorian politics was previously known. The country had twelve presidents in the ten years before Correa came to...
By Matthew Hayes The tragic death of two teenagers from north of Cuenca who tried to stow away on a Latam jet bound for the U.S. draws attention to the privileged mobility of North Americans relocating to Ecuador — some of whom have commented on these deaths in ways...
By Philip Goff In the past 40 or so years, a strange fact about our Universe gradually made itself known to scientists: the laws of physics, and the initial conditions of our Universe, are fine-tuned for the possibility of life. It turns out that, for life to be...
By Nicholas Carr I have received innumerable emails and texts from panicked parents worried that they may be failing in what has become the central challenge of modern parenting: ensuring that children grow up to be well adapted to the realtime environment. These...
By Megan Alpert We recently spoke to two editors of Ecuadoran media outlets that do fact-checking about how fake news and disinformation affected two recent votes in Ecuador. In a historic vote on 4 February, Ecuadorians approved a government proposal to reinstate...
By Umair Haque You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously...
By Catherine Nichols The first time we see Darth Vader doing more than heavy breathing in Star Wars (1977), he’s strangling a man to death. A few scenes later, he’s blowing up a planet. He kills his subordinates, chokes people with his mind, does all kinds of things a...
By Michael Shifter and Ben Raderstorf South America’s biggest political surprise recently has come from one of its smallest countries, Ecuador, where President Lenin Moreno has maneuvered to break with his predecessor and a legacy tinged with authoritarianism and...
By David H. Freedman At the heart of America's vaunted health care system is a frustrating puzzle. The United States pays three times as much per citizen as the average of other wealthy nations — far more than even the second-highest spender, Switzerland, adding up to...
By Jack Shenker Shortly after midnight on Friday, 28 January 2011, someone in 26 Ramses Street, a nondescript 12-storey office building in downtown Cairo, turned off Egypt’s internet. No email, web access, WhatsApp or Skype. It didn’t matter. A few hours later,...
By Clive Sanford Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies have loyal followers who believe that the future of mediums of exchange and stores of value is in currency constructs that are outside the purview of governments and central banks. They also have confidence that the...
By David Benatar In 2006, I published a book called Better Never to Have Been. I argued that coming into existence is always a serious harm. People should never, under any circumstance, procreate – a position called ‘anti-natalism’. In response, readers wrote letters...
By Nicholas Tampio In early 2017, Scientific American published a symposium on the threat that "big nudging" poses to democracy. Big Data is the phenomena whereby governments and corporations collect and analyze information provided by measuring sensors and internet...
By Soledad Stoessel It may be a bit much to invoke Gustav Meyrink’s Golem – the indomitable clay creation that destroyed everything in its path, alive but soulless – but the lurching, paradoxical maneuvering of Ecuador’s president, Lenin Moreno, does lend itself to...
By Ramiro Crespo After teasing the public for several weeks, president Lenin Moreno last week finally presented seven questions that will appear on a public referendum. There were some surprises. Momentum appears behind him as the opposition, including key leaders...
By Chris Hedges The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global...
By Thea Riofrancos On March 8, 2012, a few hundred marchers set out from Pangui, Ecuador, a town in the southeastern Amazon, near the construction site of the massive, open-pit Mirador Mine. Just days earlier, a consortium of Chinese state-owned companies had signed a...
By Judd Gregg The European Union has assessed a major fine against Google. In addition, the leaders of the European Union want to assess a large tax on the revenues of Amazon, Facebook and Google. France wants to tax all the social media platforms that are being used...
By Matt Weinberger One day, not too soon — but still sooner than you think — the smart phone will all but vanish, the way beepers and fax machines did before it. Make no mistake: We're still probably at least a decade away from any kind of meaningful shift away from...
