Society & Criticism

My editors asked if I planned to write about the election, and I said yes. Perhaps they hoped I would pen something about the need to vote, a topic I’ve tackled before. But that seems unnecessary. Look at how many people have already voted. We all know the stakes in 2020. At this point,... Read more

Thomas Wolf was in a pickle. His doctor no longer prescribed him the narcotic pain reliever oxycodone for his foot injury, but his supply had run out. Wolf didn’t think he could live without his pills anymore. So he searched on YouTube: “Where can I buy drugs in San Francisco?” YouTube... Read more

This week’s New Yorker carried an article by Andrew Marantz whose main thrust was that Facebook is not doing a good job of moderating its content. The result is that all sorts of people and groups that, in the view of many experts the reporter interviewed, should not be... Read more

The New York Post published an explosive story last week reporting that, on the basis of files recovered from a laptop allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son Hunter, then-Vice President Biden met with executives from Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm for whom his son worked... Read more

Facebook is after the Babylon Bee again. Here's the article they pulled: https://babylonbee.com/news/senator-hirono-demands-acb-be-weighed-against-a-duck-to-see-if-she-is-a-witch Yes, really. Facebook deleted the post for "inciting violence," Babylon Bee appealed, an actual human... Read more

The new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma—a film about the dark side of social media explained by the Silicon Valley innovators behind it—is a kind of public service for the digital age. Most of us talk about how addictive our smartphones are. We are concerned about the role... Read more

Photography by Jim Luning My dad was the best person I’ve ever met,” Isaiah “Ike” McKinnon says simply. “He grew up in Alabama, the son of farmers and grandson of enslaved people. He played in the Negro League before starting his family, catching for Booker T. Brunion and... Read more

When rumors suggested Friday that President Donald Trump was set to nominate Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, a particularly vile line of attack began to emerge from leftist activists and blue checkmarks on Twitter. While some of these tweets were later deleted or walked... Read more

Minneapolis City Council members complained of rising crime rates in the city and asked the city’s police chief what he is doing about it during a Tuesday meeting on police reform, months after the council proposed dismantling the police department. Council members told police chief... Read more

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences suffered embarrassment in 2015 when #OscarsSoWhite started trending on social media. April Reign, the activist who started the hashtag, noted at the time that the academy’s membership was 92 percent white and 75 percent male. The... Read more