“Technology keeps getting more powerful, but our experience of it gets worse—because the business and cultural layer is about extraction, not improvement.”
Tag: politics
Ask A Genius 1612: From a 1920s Report Card to Authoritarian Alarm: Found History, Memory, and Power in America
“People tuck things into books—and sometimes they tuck entire histories inside them.”
Ask A Genius 1610: The New York Post, Murdoch’s Media Strategy, and Why James Cameron Chose New Zealand
“It would also exist essentially to irritate liberals every day, which amounts to free publicity.”
Ask A Genius 1609: FBI Resignation, ICE Shooting, and DOJ Stonewalling Claims
“In other words, it resembles stonewalling.”
Ask A Genius 1606: Symbolism, Strategy, and Second-Term Failures
“Trump’s psychology is its own weather system—symbolic victories ‘count’ to him, even when they mean nothing in reality.”
Ask A Genius 1605: Dog Death, Greenland Threats, and Meaning at Scale
“We might beat biology and then be crushed by technology. From the largest scale, we do not matter much; locally, we matter for a while. The trick is holding grief, politics, and cosmic time in the same frame without losing moral clarity.”
Ask A Genius 1602: Trump, Nobel Symbolism, and Ethical Conflict
Rick Rosner: Invoking the Insurrection Act could expand domestic deployment authority, but it does not allow a president to cancel federal elections. Scott Douglas Jacobsen: That leads to ethics: two narratives, one faith-based and transcendental, the other humanist and empirical. Who is winning, and at what cost in the U.S.?
Ask A Genius 1601: Rosie, ICE Controversies, Iran Crackdown, and America’s Political Stress Test
“We’re trying to keep her going as long as she allows. Then you look outward and everything feels more extreme—enforcement surges, outrage, and a culture that records everything. The American system has levers, but soft power is eroding. Some movements do not vanish; they age out.”
Ask A Genius 1600: Renée Nicole Good Shooting, Millionaire Lawsuit, and a Robot-Fitness Future
On a multiple-choice quiz show, the correct answer should exist among the choices. The situation was especially absurd because I am meticulous about this sort of thing. I reviewed approximately 110,000 Millionaire questions from versions of the show across more than thirty countries to confirm that my interpretation was correct.
Ask A Genius 1597: ICE Use of Force, Video Evidence, and Minneapolis Protests
“In use-of-force analysis, each shot must be justified independently. The only shot that might plausibly be argued as justified would be the first one, when the officer was closer to the front of the vehicle and could claim he felt in danger. The later shots followed after the vehicle passed.”
Rick Rosner 