Net Delusion

In a recent piece in The New Yorker , Malcolm Gladwell questioned whether Twitter and similar technologies will have the political efects that many presume. Now Evgeny Morozov raises the same question in a book-length treatment ( The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom ). According to . . . . Continue Reading »

Friends and friends

In a recent issue of The New Yorker , Malcolm Gladwell dismissed the notion that social media can promote deep social change. Activists, he points out, take courage from the companionship of like-minded and close friends. Without that shared courage, movements buckle and die. And, he argues, social . . . . Continue Reading »

Whither the Post-Healthcare Realignment?

Over at Cato, Julian Sanchez has written a post about how the aftermath of healthcare reform could reveal faultlines in existing political coalitions and trigger realignment: There’s no intrinsic commonality between, say, “left” positions on taxation, foreign policy, and reproductive . . . . Continue Reading »

Tea & Tom

The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. [ . . . ] Obama should bring together the country’s leading innovators and ask them: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need . . . . Continue Reading »

National Affairs

The heir to The Public Interest , a new journal by the name of National Affairs , is now living and breathing and live on the web. The sharp and judicious Yuval Levin has brought together a team of great minds, including Adam Keiper, Reihan Salam, and a Publications Committee full of heavies like . . . . Continue Reading »

If Hobbies Were Horses

I take the first of several laps around the track with Conor Friedersdorf, who’s doing interviews on Big Ideas for The Atlantic . I’m especially delighted to be able to speak with some coherence about a few concepts that I’ve been kicking around for a while now. First up, our bad . . . . Continue Reading »

Hipology

The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. That from a study forwarded along to Richard Florida by Cambridge ‘personality psychologist’ Jason Rentfrow. Dig deeper, and the following . . . . Continue Reading »