Society

On Venezuela and Trump's gangster capitalism

Introducing the 2026 Book Club theme

America is no longer a democracy. Authoritarianism has not won. But merely restoring the pre-Trump status quo won’t work. The country needs a democratic transformation.

by Mike Brown “I want to be more honest,” I told my counselor. I’ve gotten used to talking to counselors, case workers, psychiatrists, nurses and nurse practitioners over the past two years. At this point I am down to just a few case workers, one counselor, and one psychiatrist.

They caught my ass feeling inspired by a politician again. (Not to mention tearing up watching Lucy Dacus singing Bread and Roses). I know and I'm sorry but it is so fucking refreshing to see a politician that actually loves the city he lives in and represents. Fuck what you've

Meta shows no signs of ending the censorship initiative, leaving critics concerned about the implications for free expression.

Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.

Soundtrack: Lynyrd Skynyrd — Free Bird This piece is over 19,000 words, and took me a great deal of writing and research. If you liked it, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’

Both AI enthusiasts and market fundamentalists gloss over the context needed to understand complex systems.

Despite centuries of trying, the term ‘religion’ has proven impossible to define. Then why does it remain so necessary?

A mural at St. Andrews-Wesley United Church in Vancouver showing the ending of the Noah’s Ark story as if it happened on a BC Ferry. The word “religion” does a a lot of heavy lift…

Amid an astonishing wave of anti-Indian animus, Indian Americans are questioning their place in the country.

Dave Nuss’s pickup rumbled down the dirt road, dark, rich soil turned up in fields on either side.  The 69-year-old farmer gestured to one field then

Ezra Klein talks Zohran Mamdani and one year of his new book with Vox’s Astead Herndon.

The future of conflict is cheap, rapidly manufactured, and tough to defend against.

On Sunday evening, CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss killed a 60 Minutes segment about men deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison—a story that had been screened five times, cleared by CBS attorneys, cleared by Standards and Practices, and was scheduled to air in less than three hours.

An Incomplete Lesson Learned from History

I keep trying to think of a cool or interesting introduction to this newsletter, and keep coming back to how fucking weird everything is getting. Two days ago, cloud stalwart Oracle crapped its pants in public, missing on analyst revenue estimates and revealing it spent (to quote Matt Zeitlin of

Notes from Race Forward’s Just Narratives for Multiracial Solidarity 2025 Years ago, in my first nonprofit communications role, a colleague asked me why I was shaping my work around what the system allowed (what I thought was “realistic”), instead of imagining a system that actually served us. That question changed everything for me. At Race... Read More

"You’ve Got Mail" is a love letter from Kingsnorth’s Machine

On Balaji Srinivasan’s Spiritually Empty Future

How Political Favor Became a Deal Variable

The twentieth century was marked by rapid technological advancements and population growth, never seen before in the history of humans. It was also a century where creativity reached new heights, especially ideologically speaking. One of these political experiments was the creation of Yugoslavia. It is a country that no longer exists; however, nostalgia for it...

Radical Technology and Neighborhood Power At Reason (“The Anarchist and the Republican,” April 13), Jesse Walker writes of a period in the 1970s when an Old Rightist speechwriter for Barry Goldwater turned New Leftist (Karl Hess), and a Nixon Republican and future Reagan speechwriter  (John McClaughry), could reach unlikely consensus around values like worker self-management...

In our society the classic three ways of making a fortune still apply: inherit it, marry it, or steal it. But for an...

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SACRAMENTO, CA—Addressing the glaringly obvious cultural and linguistic differences that have become apparent in their American classroom, students at Anderson Valley High School admitted Thursday that they were experiencing difficulty understanding Timo Mäkinen, a far more thoroughly educated foreign exchange student visiting from Finland. “I feel bad because Timo is new to this country and we want him to feel welcome, but every time he speaks, the class gets lost in about five seconds because of the thoroughly informed, nuanced concepts he shares,” Anderson Valley principal Alexis Howard said of Mäkinen, whose nation avoids the almost useless practice of regular standardized testing and pays for the mandatory Masters education required of all Finnish teachers. “He always raises his hand respectfully while participating in class discussions, talks about countries the students have never heard of, and tries to help other students with the basics of math and science, but they just get confused. He even sticks out at lunch because he doesn’t eat hot dogs and cafeteria pizza. Timo’s polite about it, but he just sticks to vegetables and yogurt. And it doesn’t help that kids say it’s really hard to understand what he’s talking about due to his precise English diction and extensive vocabulary.” Howard remains hopeful that she could still make Mäkinen feel at home, as they were slated to spend time hiding in the same room during next week’s school shooting lockdown drill.