Selected Letters, Volume 2

Recent News

• In the New York Times, Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, analyzed the Oklahoma City bombing not as “lone-wolf” misanthropy, but instead as the result of decades of very deliberate, organized white-power activism.
• Yascha Mounk, author of The People vs. Democracy, talked to CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition about liberal democracy’s uncertain future amid a rise in populist authoritarianism; at Foreign Affairs, he and Roberto Stefan Foa mourned the end of the “democratic century.”
• Richard Sander, coauthor of Moving toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing, argued in the Los Angeles Times that fair housing law has succeeded in reducing racial segregation in cities like San Diego—while other American cities still struggle; Slate featured his coauthor Jonathan Zasloff’s recommendations for decreasing housing segregation going forward.
• On KGNU’s How On Earth, James DeGregori, author of Adaptive Oncogenesis, explained how, over time, mutated cells can outcompete healthy ones in the ecosystem of the body’s tissues.

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April 19: Facebook Interruptus

The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed. In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but a…