I lack both the qualifications and the words to comment in general geopolitical terms on the horrifying explosion of violence in Palestine and Israel this month. Other than that there is never any justification for intentionally killing civilians, no matter how good an excuse you say you have for doing it, I do have some […]
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Facebook Destroys Everything: Part 2
It was April 2016, and Mark Zuckerberg, clad in his usual incredibly expensive cotton t-shirt, told the world that his website – and thus, the entire Internet – was headed to a video-filled future, where live broadcasts and snappy, “snackable” content would push out the old, boring world of words. Mark told the world that […]
Facebook Destroys Everything: Part 1
I want to tell you a real bummer of a story about Facebook. The kind of no-fun, downer tale that Alex Mosseri, the head of Threads, Meta’s new social media service, said he doesn’t want his website to support. I arrived in Myanmar for the first time in November 2012, the same week that the […]
Why People Are Afraid of Drones, Part One: Drones are Inscrutable
I have long been fascinated by why people are so disquieted by drones. While pretty much every one alive in 2019 experiences some degree of acute tech anxiety, drones, as a category of objects, still inspire an unusual amount of disquiet – much more so than, say, an iPhone. This distrust extends to both consumer […]
Patriotic Lobsters: An American Mystery
We regularly drive from Boston to Southern Vermont to visit my partner’s family, up through the Green Mountains. The little two-lane road is deeply atmospheric, in that creepy Ichabod-Crane sort of way: it passes through a few little villages with economies that appear to be largely dependent on flea markets and small-batch artisan pottery. It […]
Japan Blog Post: Narisawa
I found out about Narisawa a while ago on one of those Best Restaurants in The World For Terrible Snobs websites. I’d been looking for high-end restaurants in Tokyo for our upcoming family trip, and was struck by a picture that appeared to show people eating a mossy chunk of bracken in the forest. It […]
Tokyo Day 2: 7-11, the Meiji Shrine, and Harajuku
When I can’t sleep because I’m jet-lagged, I like to go for a walk, particularly in those early-morning hours before the streets fill with people. By 6:00 in the morning in Tokyo, I was wandering around the Shiodome area trying to figure out where the 7-11 was. I had two reasons for this: one, 7-11 […]
You Don’t Want to Delete Your Facebook (And That’s OK)
Everyone should stop Facebook. Everyone is not going to stop using Facebook this week. That’s OK. There’s a middle ground between deleting your account forever and between spending all of your waking, earthly hours refreshing your Facebook feed. And we should be telling our relatives and friends about that middle ground, instead of telling them they have […]
Why Young People Live in Big Cities, Since This Needs to Be Explained Somehow
“I just don’t understand why you young people complain about high rent in the city – you could just move to the Midwest and buy a big house, if you’d get over yourselves.” You’ve heard this argument before if you live in a city. It is usually delivered by some horrible relative who is holding […]
FashMaps: Locating White Supremacists in Space
Are you worried that your neighbors are actually Nazis? Do yowling white men in polo shirts with suspect haircuts continue to hide from you, no matter how carefully you scrutinize your neighborhood? Seek no further. There is now “Fashmaps,” an activist-run website that uses public web postings to figure out where white supremacists claim to […]