the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … no longer exists: Hannah Arendt NB: The author asks: If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live… Read More A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0
The actor condemns ‘runaway train’ of unregulated slander, baseless claims and deepfakes that have dogged her in recent years Aniston was speaking to Harper’s Bazaar to coincide with a new season of The Morning Show, the TV series in which she plays a TV presenter opposite Reese Witherspoon. Aniston, who has been the target of media… Read More Jennifer Aniston says social media ‘has taken down a huge portion of humanity’
Once, I believed that humanity’s problem was an information deficit. Now, I know you can’t speak truth to power if power controls your words.. But perhaps the ground is shifting. Citizen journalism is flowering, through the Bylines network, openDemocracy, Double Down News , Novara, Declassified and DeSmog, and in particular at the local level. George Monbiot The BBC I joined on my first… Read More I have now been a journalist for 40 years. The forces ranged against my profession have never been so powerful
Rafael Behr There is a Russian proverb: don’t blame the mirror if your face is crooked. I first came across it as the epigraph to The Government Inspector, Gogol’s 1836 masterpiece satirising corruption and hypocrisy in the provinces of the tsar’s empire. The phrase sprang to mind last week when I learned that a 21st-century… Read More By sanctioning journalists, the Kremlin admits how much the truth hurts
One word, in particular, stood out to researchers as a kind of linguistic watermark. “Delve” has become an academic shibboleth, a neon sign in the middle of every conversation flashing ChatGPT was here. NB: I’ve found ‘delve‘ occuring very frequently in students assignments. DS Sara Parker Join any Zoom call, walk into any lecture hall, or… Read More You sound like ChatGPT
Hanno Hauenstein: German media helped pave the way for Israel’s murder of journalists The laws of war are clear: journalists are civilians. To target them deliberately is a war crime Jodie Ginsberg Israel always boasted that it was the only country in the region to support press freedom. That boast rang hollow even before the current war. Now, it’s… Read More Israel is wiping out Gaza’s journalists – and it’s no longer even hiding it
New York, August 10, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists is appalled by Israel’s killing in Gaza on Sunday of five Al Jazeera staff — correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh and camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, and Moamen Aliwa — as well as freelance journalist Mohammad al-Khaldi. The five Al Jazeera journalists were killed in a targeted strike on a tent… Read More Israel kills Al Jazeera journalists in targeted Gaza City airstrike
“It turns out that parents are writing names on their children’s limbs, so that it will be possible to identify them when they die” Ronen Argov at a recent protest. “We’ve reached a level of violence and cruelty where making things palatable for those who refuse to know is like supporting someone’s addiction. I won’t… Read More ‘The Children Haunt Me at Night’: The Protest That’s Forcing Israelis to Face Kids Killed in Gaza
NB: This is what needs to be said repeatedly, because so many people have shut their eyes to the most brutal campaign of mass extermination since the American punishment of Vietnam, which left some 4 million dead over a decade. The rate of murder in Gaza would please the operators of the death camps run… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: If Gaza’s corpses can vanish from our conscience, what else are we becoming blind to?
America’s epistemic challenges run deeper than social media. (NB: It’s not just an American problem) Dan Williams Many people sense that the United States is undergoing an epistemic crisis, a breakdown in the country’s collective capacity to agree on basic facts, distinguish truth from falsehood, and adhere to norms of rational debate. “The Yellow Press,” by… Read More Scapegoating the Algorithm
After the truth-shower 