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Author: Jacob Silverman

Columns

Sci-Hub vs. the Scarcity-Mongers
April 01, 2016
In his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” information activist Aaron Swartz urged everyone to do their civic duty and take up piracy. “The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage . . . is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of ...

Daily Bafflements
March 31, 2016
• Today in innovation and its discontents: contributing editor Evgeny Morozov appeared in The Guardian this week, deconstructing the tech takeover of Western politics. “While the financial industry has historically been key to ‘buying time’ and staving ...

What Obama Gets Wrong About Our Political Media
March 31, 2016
Journalists and political leaders alike are suckers for high-minded reverie. Of all the many cognitive fancies billowing through both professions, probably the most alluring one is that the best and brightest among us are charged with the sacred trust of citizen-building. ...

How to Shoot a Suspect in the Back, Reasonably
March 29, 2016
Beyond the racial prejudice of juries and district attorneys, a major—and frequently ignored—factor as to why county prosecutors fail to indict cops who maim or kill unarmed citizens is a handful of Supreme Court and federal cases that exalt police discretion over common ...

Daily Bafflements
March 29, 2016
• Andrew Auernheimer, the hacker also known as weev, is claiming to have printed anti-semitic and racist fliers remotely so that they landed right on the printer trays of US universities. Angela Nagle wrote about this fascist sympathizer in the current issue ...

Daily Bafflements
March 28, 2016
• “Today we are seeing the effects of a relentless war against the very idea of working-class politics or working-class community,” writes Baffler contributing editor David Graeber. “That has left most working people with little way to express that ...

Daily Bafflements
March 25, 2016
• Today in billionaires: Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen is donating $100 million to research at the “frontiers” of the life sciences, including a large grant to the developers of CRISPR, a gene-editing and DNA-tracking tool. Corey Pein wrote about one of ...

Daily Bafflements
March 24, 2016
• Today in billionaires: one Silicon Valley plutocrat has taken to the courts to assert his ownership of some land in California’s San Mateo County in order to prevent public beach access. The odd thing about his claim is that the land in question is at the bottom of ...

In a Big Country, Dreams Stay with You
March 24, 2016
You might think that something called “the great unsettling” involved movement of some kind: the abrupt uprooting of communities and traditions, or the migration of the dispossessed across a continent. But in the opening salvo of the Washington Post’s pompous, turgid, and ...

Daily Bafflements
March 22, 2016
• Today in the innovation economy: Rebecca Solnit writes in The Guardian about the execution of Alex Nieto and how “disruptive” the tech economy has been for “communities, traditions, and relationships.” She continues, “Many of the ...