In the wake of the grand jury report on Catholic priests abusing over a thousand children in Pennsylvania, the Pope sent a message to his flock. His passive language is emblematic of how you write to escape responsibility. The words “I’m sorry” and “It was my/our fault” are incompatible with being the infallible leader of…
The Boston Globe challenged other newspapers to write editorials in support of press freedom today. More than 350 responded. I’m a huge news fanboy. In my job as an analyst, I got to work with reporters like Jefferson Graham of USA Today, Jon Healey of the San Jose Mercury and the Los Angeles Times, Tony…
A grand jury in Pennsylvania accused more than 300 priests of sexually abusing more than 1000 children, over a period of decades. The grand jury’s 1356 page report is an amazing document, a model for clarity of description in an emotionally charged environment. I don’t clearly understand who writes documents like this or how. I’m…
Satire is the art of exaggerating reality to make a point about its absurdity. So, this just happened: Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former game show contestant hired at the White House and fired less than a year later, claims that the reason President Trump is senile is that he drinks eight Diet Cokes a day. President…
Social media helped us shake up rigid institutions and empower people, but gave us a new world that has proven to be brittle and destructive. The new power structures that have arisen aren’t up to the job of maintaining our civilization. When Charlene Li and I wrote Groundswell ten years ago, we had a utopian vision…
It’s clear that Russians interfered in our elections. But their objective was not primarily to elect Donald Trump — it was to make us hate each other. And they’re succeeding. New information on Russian troll activity is now available, including a corpus of 3 million tweets from Russian trolls who were part of a foreign…
Facebook has joined Apple, Youtube, and Disqus in banning Alex Jones and yanking his InfoWars pages. Jones and his supporters are livid, claiming free speech violations, while liberals are wondering what took so long. The challenge here is that lying on Facebook is perfectly fine; only “hate speech” will get you banned. Let’s take a…
I’ve written that noncompete agreements should cost companies something. Massachusetts has finally addressed this issue with a law passed at the end of July, awaiting the governor’s signature. But it’s shot full of holes, and won’t make Massachusetts the competitive innovation economy that it needs to be. In California, noncompetes are void by law. The…
Donald Trump has repeatedly described special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into his presidential campaign a “rigged witch hunt.” He’s right about one thing: there is clear evidence of a rigged witch hunt in Washington. But it’s not the one he thinks it is. Here’s a typical Trump tweet, one of many that cite the Rigged…