Progress Against People
A reader wrote to me today about artificial intelligence: “What strikes me is that everyone is excited about the wonderful savings it will bring. And nothing else. Nowhere do you…
Childhood in the Feed
I had hoped that a proposal to restrict social media access for children under fifteen in the Czech Republic might pass through the realm of expert debate without immediately becoming…
The Cost of Irrationality
Many of the phenomena we today describe as decadent or signs of decline—phenomena we fear might one day destroy our civilization—look very different when examined more closely. The developments that…
Progress Turned Pathological
Some troubling signs of decline are hard to fight precisely because they ride on top of centuries-long trends that are, in many ways, genuinely positive. We’ve seen a long-term drop…
Power Without Excellence
The editors of major media outlets and the public figures who appear in them as “officials” and “experts” speak a language different from that of ordinary people in everyday life.…
Measuring Corporate Power
Matthew Yglesias recently published a sharp-edged essay arguing that all the talk about “corporate power” and the need to rein it in amounts to little more than empty sloganeering. If…