First Derivative [26]
Last week before moving into school today. And 6 month anniversary of this newsletter. Thanks for subscribing!
How Hate Groups Forced Online Platforms to Reveal Their True Nature
White supremacist marchers had not yet lit their torches when the deletions began. The ‘‘Unite the Right'' Facebook page, which had been used to organize the rally in Charlottesville, was removed the day before the event was…
Strongly recommend. This is part of what makes me so hopeful for blockchain-enabled decentralized web apps that allow for participatory communities.—TK
Why Is the Southern Poverty Law Center Targeting Liberals?
Since the violence in Charlottesville 10 days ago, when white supremacists left one young woman dead and 19 others injured, the Southern Poverty Law Center has hit the jackpot. The Alabama-based nonprofit is set to receive millions of dollars in…
Is the World Slouching Toward a Grave Systemic Crisis?
On August 5, Philip Zelikow delivered the following keynote address at the annual meeting of the Aspen Strategy Group, a discussion forum for experts and government practitioners. Zelikow, who is currently the White Burkett Miller Professor of…
Funding the Evolution of Blockchains
Blockchains are digital organisms. As organisms evolve though changes in their DNA, blockchain protocols evolve through changes in their code. And like biological organisms, the most adaptive blockchains will be the ones that survive and thrive. So…
In the spring of 1975, my brother Michael, then 24, was on his way home from his third trip through Asia when he arrived in Israel, planning to stay a few weeks before heading back to New York. On April 28th, he wrote to our parents: 'I've been…
The Most Shortsighted Attack on Free Speech in Modern U.S. History
When free-speech advocates point out that the First Amendment protects even hate speech, as the attorney Ken White recently observed, they are often met with extreme hypotheticals. For example: “So, the day that Nazis march in the streets…
Ethereum Is Coding's New Wild West
Pelle Braendgaard has the textbook bio of an old-guard programmer. At 12, he often went to his local computer store in Denmark to write BASIC code on an eight-bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum. In 1993, he stumbled across Mosaic, the first graphical web…
On the night of November 7, 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes's wife, Lucy, took to her bed with a headache. The returns from the Presidential election were trickling in, and the Hayeses, who had been spending the evening in their parlor, in Columbus…
Carl Icahn's Failed Raid on Washington
One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency. Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A…
The defenestration of Steve Bannon will bring some badly needed calm to the White House, at least in the short term. But the deepest crisis of confidence in American foreign policy since the 1940s isn't going away. Neither is Mr. Bannon, as he told…