Sublime

The question is revealing. It tells me that the practice of public officials shopping “dirt” to reputable journalists has become so common, this twentysomething I’ve never met before has no compunction about raising it openly in front of his colleagues. He thinks his job, as he collects a salary from taxpayers, is to conduct and spread opposition r

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process”, or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who repor

The political nature of the selective outrage was obvious. The “tell” is how American Bridge and its allies easily overlooked Democrats embroiled in similar plagiarism scandals.

of outlandish facts and quotes—he is a tenacious reporter—and a style that barely suppresses his own amusement. It works particularly well on the buccaneers who continue to try the patience of the citizenry, as proved by his profile in The New Yorker of the developer Donald Trump. Noting that Trump “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury,

In a 2014 post on a blog run by Microsoft Research, a scholar named Christian Sandvig coined the term “corrupt personalization” to describe such flawed recommendations as the manipulative Netflix movie thumbnails and homogenous Spotify playlists. “Corrupt personalization is the process by which your attention is drawn to interests that are not your