Society Archives • Page 15 of 22 • Journal

It’s the (Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech

A special issue of Wired contains several strong pieces looking at the complex freedom of speech trade-offs required in the new information era. Pieces include – the web infrastructure company Cloudflare being embroiled in a free speech debate when offering services to far-right extremists, Reddit as a case study for civil discourse online, a startup making smartphone-neutralising pouches, six stories of censorship, and a look at a database of extremists called Whack-a-Mole.

Society The Atlantic

IÕm Not Black, IÕm Kanye

Ta-Nehisi Coates on two ÔgodsÕ_Ñ_Michael Jackson and Kanye West, his own fortune Òto come of age in the last days of mysteryÓ before the social feed, fame, and America. As one reader puts it, the writing in this piece is Òbottled lightning.Ó http://bit.ly/atlantic-kanye

Society The New Yorker

How the BBC Women Are Working Toward Equal Pay

An examination of the issues of equal pay and the gender pay gap, leading with efforts by female BBC journalists to attain compensation parity with their male colleagues.

Mel Society

The Lost Children of ‘Runaway Train’

The 1991 music video for the smash hit by Soul Asylum featured images of runaway children. This thoughtful piece follows up on their stories a quarter of a century later.

Society Wired

Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook – and the World

A piece examining the series of challenges Facebook has faced as it struggles to manage the intended and unintended consequences of its huge scale and the reach it has into many parts of its users’ lives.

Society The Guardian

How Britain let Russia hide its dirty money

A piece looking at the influx of Russian money into the UK.

Backchannel Society

Canary in the Code Mine

A look at a project to teach coding to former miners in Appalachian coal country. The project was born in part out of a dismissive comment made by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and its popularity has confounded stereotypes.

Society The Atlantic

The Patriarchy Hates the Moon

The story of man’s uneasy relationship with the moon, culminating in planned nuclear attacks on it by both Soviet and American governments during the Cold War. http://www.bit.ly/atlantic-moon

Harper's Society

The Weekly Package

A look at the way in which many Cubans get access to the international culture that has historically been denied to them – a weekly delivery of films, TV and other content on a USB stick.

Society The Atlantic

Al Franken, That Photo, and Trusting the Women

This eloquent piece looks at the sexual harassment allegations against Senator Al Franken and uses them as a springboard to examine humanity’s long history of identifying trustworthiness as a male trait and duplicity as its female counterpart – via Aristotle, Galen, Jezebel, Cassandra, Hamlet and others.