Latest
February 22, 2023
Back in the Doomsday Spirit
Tarpley Hitt
There are a couple of anecdotes that routinely come up in media coverage of Sequoia Capital, the V.C. firm now notorious for investing and then losing $150 million in the crypto exchange FTX. A recent one is Sequoia’s assurance that its partners had run a “rigorous diligence process” on the failed platform. Another is the fact that Sequoia deleted a fawning, 14,000-word profile of FTX’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, from its...
February 22, 2023
Saving Kids from the Street
JS Tan
We were always told that the internet would bring about a new era, one marked by dynamism, entrepreneurship, and innovation. And if you look at the numbers, the economic contribution of the tech sector speaks for itself. As of 2021, a Harvard Business School study found, the American internet economy accounted for twelve percent of the nation’s GDP and had grown seven times faster than the rest of the economy...
February 22, 2023
A Volatile Internet Landscape
Annie Rauwerda
As a kid in Huntsville, Alabama, Jimmy Wales would eagerly plaster his family’s World Book Encyclopedia set with stickers made by the company containing updated information. Some twenty years later, in 1996, he was a PhD dropout building a fledgling company called Bomis, which created web portals linking to sites about laddish topics like cars, philosophy, and sports. The site didn’t find success, however, until it started focusing on porn,...
February 22, 2023
The Invisible Workforce
David Ethan Jones-Krause (as told to Lora Kelley)
When the Alphabet Workers Union announced its union drive in early 2021, I joined pretty much immediately. I went to the union website and filled out a sign-up form, and I got connected with committees and a steward. At the time, I was working for Google as a vendor, which entailed writing, editing, and publishing support content. For my entire career, I’ve only worked jobs where I was a temp,...
February 15, 2023
Shiny Objects | The Koh-i-noor, Rishi Sunak, and the Aesthetics of Anticolonialism
Pranay Somayajula
It’s unclear who, exactly, was the first person to refer to India as the “jewel in the crown of the British Empire.” The phrase has been commonly attributed — perhaps apocryphally — to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who proclaimed Queen Victoria Empress of India in 1877. It was popularized by British novelist Paul Scott, who in 1966 used it as the title of the first book in his Raj...
February 14, 2023
New History | Poetry
Jessica Laser
Maybe the worst thing about American Puritanism is the position it forces its opponents into. — Robert Hass 1. Jimmy, when we say sorry, is it I love you in disguise? Everyone does it, marries the Stranger, taboo to do it otherwise. When we say we don’t Understand, is it I could put my faith in you, Someone I don’t really know? Compared to us He was a Rabbi. One...
February 7, 2023
After the Fatwa | Losing Faith in Salman Rushdie
Zain Khalid
Following the vicious attack on Salman Rushdie last August in Chautauqua, New York, following the news that the writer had been stabbed at least ten times and lost the use of a hand and sight in one eye, following the requisite denunciations of his assailant, there began a hagiography. In The Atlantic, Bernard-Henri Lévy lauded “The Immortal Salman Rushdie.” The New Yorker’s David Remnick argued that Rushdie should win the...
November 1, 2022
Tiny Beasts | Fiction
Ayla Zuraw-Friedland
Global warming was fucking up the squirrels. It was of course fucking everything up — the new and improved Boston Seaport would be underwater in twenty years, and the mosquitos were leaving particularly nasty welts. But special attention was on the squirrels. Higher-than-usual temperatures were fermenting the berries they ate off the trees and getting them so drunk they lost their sense of balance. They dented the roofs of cars...
November 1, 2022
Three Poems | Poetry
Natalie Shapero
Play In Often I have been told I should be in movies, not because I am glamorous or anything like that, but because my expressions are at times borderline imperceptible; seeing me from a regular distance, people can’t tell how I feel. So really what they’re recommending is enlargement, the ability to be transmitted to others by close-up. Isn’t there a way to get this accomplished without becoming an actor?...
November 1, 2022
But What I Really Want to Do Is Write! | The Year of the Auteur Novel
Hanson O’Haver
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote. She also wrote, with her husband, more than twenty screenplays in order to make money. The couple was hardly alone: from the early days of Hollywood, literary figures like Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Brecht took a swing at the pictures. More recent efforts have come from Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, and...
