Not all work is created equal — Later today, I will pull up an app on my phone and push a little button. The button will make a robot clean my floors for me. I’m happy to let my Roomba do the vacuuming. I don’t think I’m missing out if I don’t haul a vacuum cleaner around…

The Dubai meeting could change the direction of climate politics — Between November 30 and December 12, the biggest yearly event in climate politics will take place: the 28th Conference of Parties (usually referred to as COP 28). COP meetings, which have taken place at least once a year since 1995, are where the world’s nations get together to discuss the…

How to approach a never-ending torrent of information — Charlie Warzel had a typically insightful piece in The Atlantic the other day, in which he argued that journalists’ complaints about the role of social media in distributing the news may be misplaced. Sure, Facebook and Twitter have had a negative impact on the news business, but… It’s not just…

How social media distorts our sense of what matters — Did you hear? The kids all went wild for Osama bin Laden on TikTok. For a day or two, according to some reports, Gen Z was entranced by the late Al Qaeda leader’s Letter to America, seeing it, I guess, as some kind of anti-imperialist, “decolonizing” manifesto that lined up…

Or: will you get a rebate for that heat pump? — Winter is coming! If you are looking to replace or upgrade your heating equipment, you should probably get a heat pump. Heat pumps are incredibly efficient and, most importantly, they’re electric, which means that they can operate without fossil fuels. Replacing as many gas and oil furnaces as possible with…

Cancel election night! — Remember election night, 2020? A recent podcast between David Runciman and Jill Lepore took me back there. The conversation reminded me how strange that election night had been. The election took place in the midst of a pandemic, which meant that voting looked very different from other years. The incumbent…

A partial defense of political parties — Let me tell you something that will not surprise you: a lot of Americans are not big fans of political parties. According to Pew, almost one-third of us do not like either political party (the highest such number yet recorded; in 2002, only 7% of Americans thought this). Furthermore: A…

Can we learn lessons from history in the long run? — In his famous 1989 essay, “The End of History?” Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that liberal democracy was the last political ideology standing. In his formulation, democracy had defeated two competitors over the course of the twentieth century. In the year that he wrote the essay, Fukuyama was watching communism crumble in…

The essay is still not dead — I attended a professional development seminar on AI in the classroom the other day. The presenter (I won’t name him here, because I don’t want to pick on him as an individual), a nationally-known consultant on educational technology, took us through the usual tech-enthusiast talking points: AI will kill zillions…