- Michael Stott: Will pressure from Trump cause Cuba to finally buckle? We visited Cuba 12 years ago and impressions from that visit now seem terribly quaint. A horrible regime doing horrible things to good people.
- Steven Simon: How ‘homeland’ put America on the path to illiberalism. My favorite T-shirt is almost as old as the Department of Homeland Security — should it not have been the first one to go if one were to cut down on the number of government agencies? As Cory Doctorow recently wrote: “…things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children.”
- Laura Bates: How tech turned against women. Not surprising to anyone who’s spent 5 minutes scrolling through a large enough men-only group chat. Out of 20 men at least two will be pervs — enough to poison the stream through mutual encouragement.
- Janan Ganesh: What social media gave us. An avenue in which to spot the ocasional flash of insight from an unlikely intellectual, mostly. But:
Notice that I have used the past tense about social media in much of this column. To my mind, it is dead, as I quit it long ago. That is a move to be recommended. (Don’t announce that you are leaving, though. Just leave. You are not Adele cancelling that last Vegas residency of hers.)
Indeed.