Alexis C. Madrigal
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Google Why Google Doesn't Rank Right-Wing Outlets Highly
Mainstream media organizations are better-resourced and do far more reporting than smaller, explicitly politicized outlets.
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Robert Galbraith / Reuters Big Tech's Newest Experiment in Criminal-Justice Reform
The unicorn start-up Slack is launching an apprenticeship program for formerly incarcerated people. But will the industry ever hire from the inside en masse?
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Artiga Photo / Getty Waymo’s Robot Cars, and the Humans Who Tend to Them
People are always the hack that make automated systems work.
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Reuters/Mario Anzuoni How a Wells Fargo Counting Error Cost Hundreds Their Homes
Calculating homeowners’ eligibility for mortgage modifications should have been straightforward. But an automated decision-making tool contained an error for five years.
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Alexis Madrigal The Strange Infinities of e-Commerce
When it costs as much to retail 200,000 things as one thing, the world gets a little odd.
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Oli Scarff / Getty What Does It Mean to Ban Alex Jones?
The inconsistent embargo on Infowars demonstrates the breadth of tools tech companies have to police speech.
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Wikipedia / The Atlantic Wikipedia, the Last Bastion of Shared Reality
The culture wars are coming for the best utopian project of the early internet. Can it survive the informational anarchy that’s disrupted the rest of media?
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Adam Hunger / Reuters How Software Ate the Point of Sale
Or, why paying for stuff is so complicated now
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Dado Ruvic / Reuters Tech’s Fractal Irresponsibility Problem
Each new scandal reflects in miniature the shape of the industry’s big problems.
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Reuters/Christian Hartmann Were We Destined to Live in Facebook’s World?
The author of a new book, Antisocial Media, discusses whether the rise of Facebook was inevitable.
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Sorry to Bother You/Annapurna Pictures What Sorry to Bother You Gets Right About Memes
They are powerful but politically meaningless.
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Reuters / Mariana Bazo Why Facebook Wants to Give You the Benefit of the Doubt
Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks about Holocaust denial once again showed Facebook’s optimism about human nature.
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Riccardo Savi How Do You Measure a Country?
MacArthur “genius” award winner Carrie Mae Weems’s reflections on police violence ask the audience to understand that, yes, brutal violence is America.
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Denis Balibouse / Reuters Against Big Philanthropy
Philanthropy sounds nice, but it’s still a tax-sheltered way that plutocrats exercise power, says Stanford's Rob Reich.
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Ian Wagreich/Aspen Institute Civic Tech in a Time of Technopessimism
Since 2016, the technology industry has been looking for answers. Code for America might have one.
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MirageC / Getty Disposable America
A history of modern capitalism from the perspective of the straw. Seriously.
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New York Public Library The Meaninglessness of the Stock Market Index in a Digital World
It’s not a good snapshot of the economy, which is incomprehensible anyway, and we now have far more information to understand the country’s companies.
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U.S. Customs and Border Patrol The Making of an Online Moral Crisis
How the many-chambered heart of the internet turned the Trump administration’s family-separation policy into a different kind of scandal.
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Lucy Nicholson / Reuters Will Uber and Lyft Become Different Things?
Ride-hailing companies are diversifying away from their core business, but right into more direct competition.
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Shu Zhang / Reuters How Bad Is Facebook’s New China Problem?
A Chinese tech giant with connections to the government appears to be among Facebook’s partners in a data-sharing program.
