Posts:
By Chunka Mui I want to scream “You’re not helping!” every time I read a story like this one, which recently ran in USA Today: “End of civilization: climate change apocalypse could start by 2050 if we don't act, report warns.” I certainly worry about what might befall...
By Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists, it has also provoked...
By Rick Shenkman Everything was unfolding as it usually does. The academics who gathered in Lisbon this summer for the International Society of Political Psychologists’ annual meeting had been politely listening for four days, nodding along as their peers took to the...
By Jonathan Franzen “There is infinite hope,” Kafka tells us, “but, unfortunately, it is not for us.” This is a fittingly mystical epigram from a writer whose characters strive for ostensibly reachable goals and, tragically or amusingly, never manage to get any closer...
By Mac Margolis Argentine President Mauricio Macri’s political fortunes are crumbling. First voters delivered the struggling incumbent an upside-the-head defeat in the August 11 primaries. Then the financial markets piled on, blackening the country’s sovereign credit...
By Brett Easton Ellis Somewhere in the last few years — and I can’t pinpoint exactly when — a vague yet almost overwhelming and irrational annoyance started tearing through me maybe up to a dozen times a day. This annoyance was over things so seemingly minor, so out...
By Caitlin Johnstone CNN has published an unbelievably brazen and dishonest smear piece on Julian Assange, easily the most egregious article of its kind since the notoriously bogus Assange-Manafort report by The Guardian last year. It contains none of the “exclusive”...
It has been three months since my last column and I have been sitting here in front of my computer screen for two hours trying to decide how to begin this one. Even if I don't write regularly, my life does go on so here are some things about that life that have...
By M.C. McGrath and Glenn Greenwald Julian Assange has been barred from communicating with the outside world for more than three weeks. On March 27, the Government of Ecuador blocked Assange’s internet access and barred him from receiving visitors other than his...
By C. Thi Nguyen Something has gone wrong with the flow of information. It’s not just that different people are drawing subtly different conclusions from the same evidence. It seems like different intellectual communities no longer share basic foundational beliefs....
By Joel Simon Ecuador’s new president, Lenin Moreno, took office in May 2017 with a pledge to uphold press freedom, declaring in his inauguration speech, “There can’t be dialogue without freedom of expression.” These words would be unremarkable if not for the fact...
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...
