Sublime

The narrative of Free America shaped the parameters of acceptable thinking for Smart America. Free trade, deregulation, economic concentration, and balanced budgets became the policy of the Democratic Party. Culturally it was cosmopolitan, embracing multiculturalism at home and welcoming an increasingly globalized world. Its donor class on Wall Str

By late 2017, Berkeley had replaced Oxford as the financial capital of effective altruism. One reason for this was that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, signaled their intent to give away most of their multibillion-dollar fortune to effective altruist causes—but there were others. Oxford was still the movement’s intellec

(My 93-year-old mother has kept her subscription to the Washington Post strictly because she loves the crossword puzzles. I have shown her websites teeming with crossword puzzles, but she remains unmoved. My mother wants her bundle, and belongs to the last generation to do so.) Information sought a less grandiose, less industrial level of circulati

As I reflected on this, I started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis. He warned that the way we are reading seems to be changing as we migrate to the internet—so

It was as if you could buy only the books that appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, but the list was operated by an untrustworthy company, one solely devoted to treating books as fungible objects to be offloaded as quickly as possible.

These incidents of “political correctness,” amplified by right-wing media, whipped up hatred of elites out in Real America. The culture wars raged on, as bloody-minded and durable as the Thirty Years’ War, a full-employment program for pundits of every type. Some worried about a generation of ultra-sensitive children coddled by ultra-indulgent adul

was the guardian of the Facebook Ads team, sussing out obscene