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Fifty years ago today, Thomas Merton died suddenly during a visit to Thailand. During the past few months, I’ve been thinking about the ways his life and writings speak both…

In 2014, Cambridge Analytica used an app called thisisyourdigitallife to surreptitiously obtain data from 50 million Facebook accounts. They then used all of this information in 2016 to help Donald Trump’s…

We should all be grateful to Siva Vaidhyanathan. He has endured great pain and suffering to explore a dangerous new landscape, and he now offers to be our guide to…

Editor's Note: Matt's piece kicks off a mini-symposium on the question of whether localists should use social media, and if so, how. As a Twitter user myself, albeit a somewhat…

When an autonomous Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, Uber suspended its fleet of self-driving cars and assured everyone that it was “cooperating with authorities.” Such “cooperation”…

From a jail cell in Birmingham, Martin Luther King, Jr. charged us to acknowledge our “inescapable network of mutuality.”  Fifty-five years later, our networks of mutuality remain inescapable.  And they’re…

Several times lately I’ve opened my email and found notices about people who want to friend me, but I don’t think that means they want to befriend me. Thanks to…

From the mountaintop, the little people of this world appear very small indeed.

Whatever else you make of Facebook friendship, it underscores the great and significant discrepancy between: 1) the scale of contemporary life, and 2) the scale of friendship.

Most of us require an extended social network to keep us mentally and morally awake, and for a laugh, too, and if these friends are people we can weave in…