This is an unlocked, bonus segment of Open Source. You can hear weekly conversations and extended interviews like this one by subscribing and supporting our work on Patreon. In her new book, Natural Causes: An ...

Three questions they didn’t get Mark Zuckerberg to consider. For openers: that leak of 87 million identities to Cambridge Analytica: was it a bug in the system, or a feature of it?  Facebook’s core business ...

There’s a quick, strange turn in our weather and it’s not just springtime. Public school classrooms, oddly enough, are the source of the storm winds: first the take-charge teenagers of the Parkland generation, ready to ...

In the annals of rock music albums, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is one of a kind. In an earthy medium, it’s a masterpiece of abstraction.  Indecipherable. Irresistible. Influential. Accidental, it seemed, from the first licks ...

Martin Luther King Jr. comes to seem larger in his absence these last 50 years, himself a cosmos, in Walt Whitman speak, containing multitudes—and not contradictions so much as multiples. He was a midnight-oil Ph.D. ...

The case for prison education is alive again, in the land of mass incarceration, the case for reimagining prisons as colleges and universities of life. Malcolm X in his Autobiography gave the classic example: when ...

Black Panther, the movie, is heading toward $1-billion at the box office on just its third weekend. Already it seems that commercial success is likely not what Black Panther will be remembered for. It is ...

“Call me by your name,” the lovers say, “and I’ll call you by mine.” In the movie running strong for Oscar honors, the breathless word play is all about self-discovery in mad love for the ...

The Syrian war is not over, meaning the war of the Assad regime to crush large swaths of its population. Syria, the proxy war of great powers and close neighbors, may in fact be getting ...

Behold the Almighty Algorithm, a snippet of computer code coming to stand for a Higher Authority in our secular age, a sort of god. Algorithms are provoking a backlash, too, against the very idea of ...