I’ve been thinking a lot about robots lately, but not the ones that assemble cars or wander around warehouses. I’m thinking about the robots that call, email and text me every day, each one pretending there’s a person on the other end. Every morning, I receive emails from various so-called people who claim to represent a

Lawyer, activist, and friend of mine Larry Lessig was on stage at the P&T Knitwear Bookstore a few weeks ago. Talking about the corrosive nature of money in politics, he used a metaphor about the Titanic. “The captain of the Titanic, he hits the iceberg, looks out on the deck, and there’s a whole bunch of

I realized recently that I’m talking to more creatures, devices, AI, and machines in my life every day. It didn’t used to be this way. Back when I first thought about the dog days of summer, I was a filmmaker and television producer. And the dog days of summer were, to be honest, a great subject.

For the past month, a strange question has been bouncing around the internet: Is Mitch McConnell dead? Not politically dead. Actually dead. McConnell went into the hospital, disappeared from public view, and the rumors started. Then came a series of oddly specific assurances from people who said they had spoken with him. Twenty minutes with Mitch.

I was in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room on January 31, 2024, when the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, X, Snap, and Discord faced hours of questioning about the harms their platforms have caused to children. At one point, Senator Lindsey Graham looked directly at the executives and said: “You have blood on your hands. You

So it’s summer and the world has slowed down, and I decided it was time to actually crack open a genuine beach read. Now, we’ve all experienced beach reads. They’re kind of fun, topical, quirky books, fiction mostly, that give you a chance to have your brain shut off and relax a little bit. I’m not so

In just the past six months, my inbox has changed. Each morning I wake to a series of pleasant emails from Joe, Sally, or Fred, each of them “checking in” or “following up.” They know my name, the work I do, something about the projects I’m involved in, and how the service they’re offering could

I couldn’t stop thinking about one image from this year’s Fourth of July. Not the fireworks. The fences. For the first time, America’s birthday on the National Mall was framed by miles of ominous black anti-climb fencing. Not the waist-high barricades we’ve come to expect at parades. Eight-foot steel walls. The kind of fencing Americans associate

It’s summer. Families are busy, hopefully taking time off. Mark Zuckerberg is counting on that. Continue reading on Medium »