In the Media

The fate of Chelsea Convenience shows, in its small way, that business and capitalism can be at odds — that the drive for immense capital gains can drain the life out of human-scale business. For entrepreneurs, the American economy, with its extreme centralization, is becoming more like the Soviet economy Mr. Feygim left behind.

Facebook is now the outlier, and it is increasingly hard to understand why it is insisting on accepting not only political advertising, but even deliberate and malicious lies if they are in the form of paid advertisements. Given how much can go wrong — and has gone wrong — the question everyone is asking is: Why does Facebook think it needs to be in this game?

By Kimberlé Crenshaw
The death of Ms. Jefferson has mobilized activists, community members and commentators to demand sweeping changes. But if history is any guide, the masses will not recognize her name, as they do Eric Garner, Michael Brown or Tamir Rice. It’s not that we lack stories of black women killed by the police; rather, it seems that we don’t know what to do with them.

If the race for powerful A.I. is indeed a race among civilizations for control of the future, the United States and European nations should be spending at least 50 times the amount they do on public funding of basic A.I. research. 

“Now that we don’t have Kennedy on the court, it would be a stretch to find a fifth vote in favor of any of these claims that are coming to the court,” said Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia and the author of “Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality.”

By Tim Wu
Cynicism in the face of pious corporate proclamations can be healthy. But there is increasing reason to think that the virtuous corporation is not an oxymoron but a necessity.