My late colleague, Neil Postman, used to ask about any new proposal or technology, “What problem does it propose to solve?” When it comes to Facebook, that problem was maintaining relationships over vast time and space. And the company has solved it, spectacularly. Along the way, as Postman would... Read more

In the beginning, coronavirus denialism was easy. When widespread American deaths were still confined to the rising slopes of epidemiological models, skeptics could dismiss them as alarmist predictions. That included the nation’s most prominent coronavirus truther: “Just stay calm,” Donald Trump said on March 10, “it will go away.”... Read more

Wikipedia shows, however, that extreme circumstances, especially when related to public health, require different, more stringent rules, not better application of existing rules. The stakes are simply too high. I spoke this week with the Wikipedia editor who guided the article about the new coronavirus from a one-sentence item... Read more

I’m not trying to beat up on individual journalists, who are working hard under difficult conditions. In fact my point is the opposite: The challenge is institutional, not individual. It requires reporters and editors—especially editors, who write the headlines—to think collectively about applying the norms of objective reporting in... Read more

The second shared characteristic of conspiracy theories is a preoccupation with them. They (whomever “they” might be) stand for everything that we (whomever “we” might be) despise. They are actively trying to dismantle our way of life. Sometimes, they are believed to have already infiltrated society, or at least... Read more

There’s a deadly virus spreading throughout China right now, but SELF Magazine has a calming message for Americans: “For perspective,” the publication tweeted Thursday, “the flu is a bigger threat in the U.S.” This was just the latest in an epic run of such comparisons: “The virus killing U.S.... Read more

It was all bunk, of course, and by 2016, the game should have been up. Ted Cruz’s presidential run had fizzled, despite—or perhaps because of—its reliance on Cambridge Analytica. When CA board member Steve Bannon took control of the Donald Trump presidential campaign that summer, he brought the firm’s... Read more

In Afghanistan, the problem has been religious unrest: The Taliban imposed overlapping bans on vaccination, both in big events and in the house-to-house “mop up” days that follow. (They are now allowing vaccine to be administered in public buildings but not in homes.) In Pakistan, the issue is political... Read more

He says he chose this path, conceived his new way of sensing the world, to answer a yearning for space and flight during a childhood in which he was bullied. Being tethered to machinery may require extraordinary steps, he said, but “for me, it’s more annoying to be limited... Read more

Gelman and his colleague Eric Loken didn’t care for these alternatives. In 2013, they wrote that they “regret the spread of the terms ‘fishing’ and ‘p-hacking’ (and even ‘researcher degrees of freedom’),” because they create the “misleading implication that researchers were consciously trying out many different analyses on a... Read more