If you’re shocked, as I am, by the Presidential election result, you live in a bubble...Your job now is to step outside of whatever bubble you live in and educate yourself... Paying for news — investing in quality journalism and a free and open press — is what allows us to maintain our democracy. It’s not a coincidence that despots like censorship…

explore-blog: How power is divided in the American government – an animated explanation from TED. Also see British vs. American government, explained in vintage infographics.

Man differs from other animals... he has some desires which are... infinite, can never be fully gratified... Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power... However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you... eclipsed by an…

what we were doing was akin to “curation”: picking the best gems of news and analysis, and constructing a narrative around them for time-pressed readers drowning in the information overload of the web. And we were forging a direct relationship with our readers. That led me to talk with colleagues in other media organizations... understand the tre…

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it, and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while t…

this is something to be very, very excited about... Verified accounts can now add external links to their stories, allowing users to click through ... Users can also tag other users... consider tying snippets together to make an expansive and interactive content experience. Tell a story in several parts to keep users engaged and build their inte…

disconnectionists don’t seem to have a robust political plan for addressing their concerns; it’s all about small-scale individual action. “Individuals unplugging is not actually an answer to the biggest technological problems... We must subject social media to the kind of scrutiny that has been applied to the design of gambling machines in Las Veg…

Fascism’s rising while the global economy’s stagnating... And we’re…meditating? All the great spiritual masters say: everything is meditation. ... When we separate it as an activity we perform now and then, we’re not really meditating at all.... We are using the techniques of meditation ... To escape, run away, dull the pain. Like taking spir…

Power gets into our heads... give us confidence to indulge in our base urges. It can make us less empathetic, more likely to see our own success in a positive light and harshly condemn failures in others...power is only likely to magnify the negative characteristics in a man like Trump... “power simply brings our true nature out into the open”... …

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

We all have the same number of hours in the day.... Some find the time to be strategic, while others spend their whole time fire-fighting... here are 32 small changes you can make which will find you the time you need. 14. Set a time limit for everything Many tasks grow to fill the available time. You can spend weeks agonising over a design if y…

“Capgras delusions,” ... the belief that loved ones have been replaced by identical imposters... the brain has separate modules for analyzing the cognitive aspects of recognition, and for feeling the emotional aspects of familiarity... these functional fault lines in the social brain... have given rise to the contemporary Facebook generation... …

If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life... how a leader has to operate: forget about the strike-back mentality, and forge a future of warmth and partnership... He asks only, how shall I produce cooperation and friendship?

breathing practices can help reduce symptoms associated with anxiety, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and attention deficit disorder... Here are three basic breathing exercises to try on your own.

trillions of dollars are spent on making the world technologically ‘smarter’ ... but very little is spent on getting humans ready for that future... We will need to decide, very soon, where humans end and machines start, and vice-versa- and this is an ethical question NOT a technological challenge.

I’ve read dozens of journalism postmortems and tweets lamenting how and why journalists got it wrong last week. Here’s a short, probably-not-comprehensive summary:... Among the 30 survey questions sent to journalists: What's your biggest blind spot? The first answer was: “Groupthink. We draw from a limited pool of people who generally have a simi…

information bubbles didn’t burst on 8 November, but ... mainstream media and polling systems underestimated the power of alt-right news sources and smaller conservative sites that largely rely on Facebook to reach an audience... fake news is not a uniquely Republican problem... What is ... is the validation given to fake news by the now president-…

Zuckerberg... suggested the real problem is that people by nature engage with content they like and find agreeable, and dismiss things they don’t agree with online as they would in real life... it needs to implement better features to help diversify the content we see... For such an influential platform ... it’s irresponsible for Facebook to give …

Even if we do feel an emotion, there are parts associated with it that we aren’t usually aware of.

the root of our human frustration and daily anxiety is our tendency to live for the future, which is an abstraction... Writing more than half a century before our age of computers, touch-screens, and the quantified self, Watts admonishes ... "The working inhabitants of a modern city are people who live inside a machine to be batted around by its w…

Breitbart News Network is expanding its U.S. operations and launching sites in Germany and France... as it seeks to monetize the anger and anti-immigrant sentiment unleashed by Donald Trump’... Milo Yiannopoulos is ... explore launching a new television show... an opening to tap ... a wave of American populism similar to forces driving Britain …

Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the... the few who consider themselves intellectuals... Still, democracy is far from perfect... if we value its power to make good decisions, why not try a system that’s a little less fair but makes good decisions even more often? ... Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” m…

Nowhere is this interplay of darkness and light more nuanced, nor more prescient, than in Cohen’s song “Democracy.”After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western world was ablaze with the euphoria of a blind faith that democracy was coming to the East. I was there — that’s not what happened.

How to make sense of Donald Trump’s election? Here are some articles which helped me. Maybe they’ll help you.

the “crowd”—the concept, more so than the reality—was born in fin-de-siècle Paris... the fascination and fear of crowds obscures their reality and reach... But here’s the rub: “le crowd” is, in part, a mythical creature... less a feature of the modern political landscape than a creature of Le Bon’s private nightscape the “mob” that took the Bast…

many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”... if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth... when confron…

THE PARALLELS BETWEEN the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’ even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president last night are overwhelming.... both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.

There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside ... while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes... We country folk are programmed to hate the prissy elites. That brings us to Trump.

Two convergent trends are making populism a potent negative force. First, democracies have morphed into unrepresentative plutocracies that lead growing numbers of people to feel shut out and voiceless... Media ... business model is now based on social media and clicks, not facts. Clicks depend on theatrical performance, stunts, celebrity, ent…

Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating... American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information... today’s media ecosystem encourage that separatio…