That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, [John] Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. A few of us basically had an intervention the next morning, and he was very, very candid. I have to prepare in a different way. After that conversation, he came back and just worked really hard, question by question. He did what he hates to do, which is to kind of script himself.
And when we got up the next morning and we were getting ready to go, he had outlined 14 of the most likely questions on one sheet of paper, front and back, with his own notes of how he was going to handle it. When we went to see him in his locker room before the second debate at Hofstra University, he was sitting, and on the table was this sheet of paper. Again, we knew within the first ten minutes that he was right.
He just completely absorbed what he wanted to do, and he nailed it. It was really the first time that I worked closely with him that he experienced failure on a large stage. On the way to the third debate, when he was really very confident, he reflected on what happened in Denver and he said the hardest thing about it was traveling around after and seeing all these young volunteers who were keeping a stiff upper lip to encourage him.
In , no state allowed for the legal sale of weed. Now four do, and after November, another five could well join them. The number of states allowing medical marijuana has doubled, from 12 to So has the percentage of adults who say they smoke marijuana, from 7 to 13 percent, just in the last three years alone. In the early s, it was a tiny-minority position within a tiny minority.
In the s, when support for gay marriage was a mere 27 percent, a Democratic president signed the Defense of Marriage Act. When Obama became president, only two states, Massachusetts and Connecticut, allowed same-sex couples to marry. But by , that had increased to five, including Iowa. By , it was By , it was 36 — and then, a year later, Over 60 percent of the country now supports marriage equality — and 40 percent of Republicans do.
Why were these two issues different from all the others? Notably, Obama never openly campaigned for either. He dismissed legalization of marijuana with a condescending chuckle in his reelection campaign. This year, in a classic Obama straddle, his DEA continued to insist that cannabis remain a Schedule I drug — more dangerous than many of the addictive opioids devastating America — but simultaneously opened up marijuana research. That crucial element of federalism allowed Republicans to acquiesce in something they would otherwise ferociously oppose at a national level.
But most important, both issues could be seen as both conservative measures as well as liberal ones. Conservatives who believe in individual freedom already had one foot in the legal-weed camp, and those who had spent the previous few decades lauding the social benefits of civil marriage found it somewhat awkward to suddenly insist that those same values did not apply to gays.
Neither measure required government itself to do much or spend anything ; government just had to get out of the way. Support for both phenomena also transcended the usual demographic polarities. And with gays, every family, red and blue, turns out to have them. They helped create the pragmatic, constructive fusion that faltered in almost every other way and on almost every other issue. But binge-watching as an alternate method of consuming culture truly came of age a year later, on February 1, It made little sense — for starters, no one had seen even a single episode, so who, exactly, was clamoring for instant access to all 13?
Not to mention that, while viewers no longer tended to watch everything at the same time, they did tend to gravitate to social media to buzz about their favorite episodes every week. How could anyone buzz when everyone is watching a different episode? The tactic seemed not only nonsensical but counterintuitive. Instead, it was revolutionary. Netflix based the choice largely on internal data about how people watched old shows on Netflix.
So why not offer the same option for a brand-new show? As often happens with technical innovation, creative repercussions followed. TV creators can now assume a different kind of attention from their audience. The way-before-its-time show Arrested Development , stuffed full of inside jokes and Easter eggs that thwarted weekly network audiences, turned out to be perfectly suited to the streaming environment. The coy weekly striptease of network TV now seems quaintly anachronistic, and TV as a whole feels less like an all-you-can-eat buffet of delights than like the overkill of the apocryphal Roman vomitoria.
Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. The book, which tackled the variety of social and psychological traps laid for women in the contemporary workplace, was an instant best seller.
But the critical resistance, both to the often misunderstood messages Sandberg was sending and to her unlikely perch as a feminist spokesperson, was loud and fierce. Sandberg, many noted, was a wildly wealthy woman, and in urging women to reform themselves rather than the systems — from the gendered and racial pay gap to the lack of paid leave and subsidized child care — that left them with less power than their male counterparts, she was simply adding to the pressures they faced, blaming them in some way for their own inequitable predicament.
We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: Here was the final crescendo of a silly, fake battle that had stood in for feminist progress for decades: But to skeptics, the danger was that Lean In feminism would eclipse a movement for bigger alterations to our social and economic policies. What we are not talking about in nearly enough detail, or agitating for with enough passion, are the government policies, such as mandatory paid maternity leave, that would truly equalize opportunity.
We are still thinking individually, not collectively. But a funny thing happened while feminists were yelling at each other about Sheryl Sandberg: The United States started to make big, swift strides on economic policies favorable to women and families. Since , five states — including New York in — have passed paid-family-leave bills, with campaigns active in 20 more states.
In , Barack Obama talked about federally mandating paid leave in his State of the Union address and established paid sick leave for federal workers. The same year, California congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced the EACH Woman Act , which would override the Hyde Amendment which prevents poor women from accessing abortions through federal insurance programs including Medicaid. And in this election, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton supports paid sick leave, paid family leave, subsidized child care, and higher wages for child-caregivers, more-affordable education, expansion of the health-care system, a higher minimum wage, free community college, and the abolishment of Hyde.
We have, as they say, come a long way, baby. But neither did her brand of feminism get in the way of those advances, as many seemed to fear it would. Perhaps it would even be fair to argue that the amplification of these discussions — thanks to Sandberg and, yes, her many critics — has helped to raise the volume and awareness of gendered inequities enough that we have managed to move forward faster than we thought possible. One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.
The message that came out of Washington at that time is that Al Qaeda had been decapitated, that the group was on the run, that whatever was left of it were these isolated cells. At that point I was based in North Africa. I was just about to become a bureau chief for the AP. The thing that was transformative for me was that in Timbuktu, in Mali, in a building that had been occupied by the jihadists, I was able to retrieve some of the pages of documents that they had left behind after the French pushed them back in Those documents were eye-opening.
That to me was the first moment when I went, Oh, okay. I realized that I needed to very much question what was coming out of Washington. I kept on pushing them: The way these people would just light up when they were talking about it, you know, you felt like when you imagine a girl lighting up when she first sees Elvis or something. In the grand tradition of dark fairy tales, an innocent Schumer wanders into the woods, where she happens upon something alarming: The skit spirals outward in ever more fantastical directions — all three read for the part of Mrs. A harsh double standard exists for men and women when it comes to desirability.
Vanity Fair ran an oral history of the sketch. It was hardly the first or the last time Schumer went viral with a feminist conceit: There was the time she skewered the difficulty women have in accepting compliments, the sketch about a link between football and rape, the send-up of male-gaze rap videos, and many more. She became the walking embodiment of self-actualization feminism, circa ; that role became as important, or even more important, than her jokes. The jokes themselves, if you look a little closer, have a complicated, fairly specific relationship to the female experience.
It became impossible for Amy Schumer to walk outside in sweatpants without its being labeled empowering. But we should be wise and restrained in how we use that power. But do I think the critiques from the left, about drones, are fair or fully informed? With bin Laden, we had the option — the less risky option — of just firing a missile into that compound. I made the decision not to do so primarily because I thought it was important, if in fact it was him, that we be able to identify him. But depending on how you define innocents, a couple people in that compound that were not bin Laden and might be considered innocent, including one of his wives, were killed.
As a percentage, that could be counted as collateral damage that might have been higher than if we had just taken a shot when we knew that the compound was relatively empty. I will say, though, that what prompted a lot of the internal reforms we put in place had less to do with what the left or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were saying and had more to do with me looking at the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this.
It troubled me, because I think you could see, over the horizon, a situation which, without Congress showing much interest in restraining actions, you end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate. And that work has continued over the course of years now, such that this year, for example, after a lot of interagency wrestling, we were able to start our estimates of civilians who may have been killed by some of these actions.
But by the time I leave here, the American people are going to have a better sense of what their president is doing. Their president is going to have to be more accountable than he or she otherwise would have been. And I think all of that will serve the American people well in the future. In which case the best thing for me to do is to try to figure out what the right thing to do is and just do it, and worry later about how Washington is grading me.
And that was a valuable lesson. It was a valuable lesson in two ways. One, because it taught me to trust my judgment. You take the case of Syria, which has been chewed on a lot. But it continues to puzzle me, the degree to which people seem to forget that we actually got the chemical weapons out of Syria.
My decision was to see if we could broker a deal without a strike to get those chemical weapons out, and to go to Congress to ask for authorization, because nowhere has Congress been more incoherent than when it comes to the powers I have. A doctor inserted a catheter that morning. I had a real scare. After an hour, I started getting really uncomfortable. I realized nothing was draining into the bag. Literally minutes before I was supposed to be on the floor, the nurse practitioner came in and realized there was a stopper in the tube.
As soon as she removed it, everything was fine. What was different on that day was that for the first time ever, the Texas Tribune had been granted [the right] to use its technology to livestream from the Senate floor. I did not know people were watching to the extent that they were, not even close. I expected the gallery to be full, but I could hear them out on the lawn, I could hear them roar in the halls and in the rotunda, and from time to time I could literally feel the vibration of their voices beneath my feet on the Senate floor.
My Republican colleagues were going to treat this filibuster very differently. In the past, there has been a lot of leeway — senators can read names out of the phone book under the idea that everyone will be affected by the bill.
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And then I knew that they had plotted to call three strikes — that they were going to do everything they could to bring it to an end. My back was hurting, and I got another strike when a colleague helped me put a back brace on. But then I started getting mad, and when I got mad it was really great, because it kept me sharp and then time just flew, it really did.
Within a few hours we received 16, stories. The hardest part of the day, for me, was when I came to a story from a woman named Carol M. I felt as though I was reading my own story. She and her husband discovered that the child she was carrying suffered from a severe fetal abnormality, and ultimately they made the decision they felt was in the best interest of this baby that they loved and had wanted very, very much. But then my Democratic Senate colleagues began to argue points of order, masterfully eating up the clock. Finally, at about a quarter till, the filibuster was officially called to an end.
At that point my sister, [then-]Senator Leticia Van de Putte, who was not expected to be in the Senate that day — she had just buried her father — but made a decision to drive the one and a half hours to the capitol, came in. She immediately sized up what was going on and of course became very upset. So she was shouting to be heard, and when she was finally recognized, she had the most perfect, poignant question.
President], at what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room? Their upset spilled out in that moment. They were screaming at the top of their lungs, in the hallways, in the rotunda, and outside on the capitol lawn. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have.
A History of President Obama’s 8 Years in Office
Perry case in We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake.
He was incredibly impressive. We made the judgment to take a position on marriage equality, and the position we took two years later in the Obergefell v. Hodges case followed from that. We ground both our arguments in this concept of equal dignity under the Equal Protection Clause. The difference is that in Perry , we were trying to offer the court a stepping-stone on the way to full marriage equality — because of a concern that the court might not be ready yet, in , to take the step all the way.
So we took an intermediate position: This is a place where the concept of dignity really matters. We tried to make a very strong doctrinal argument rooted in the Equal Protection Clause, but we tried to infuse it with an appreciation and understanding of what our society is like now, and how incongruous it is to say that gay and lesbian people can live openly as couples in society, and raise children, and go to PTA meetings and everything else, and yet be denied marriage equality.
His most ardent admirers and nemeses alike invoke the now-familiar litany: They cite the snuff-film horrors of ISIS and its remorseless spread around the globe. And they pointedly compare it with Sarajevo, where similar war crimes came to an end during the s thanks to American power. But even his most loyal defenders concede that he was too slow to make up his mind about Syria. He seemed almost to resent it — as if the conflict were, like the American project in Iraq, an unwanted inheritance from his predecessor. And in fact, his impatience to get free of Iraq played a role in spawning the Syrian nightmare.
But Syria was different. Decades of minority rule had built up enormous pressures, and the regime was more cunning and better prepared than those that fell in the Arab Spring. Obama resisted but, after a round of strong lobbying by Israel and Jordan, eventually signed a secret order for the CIA to arm and train rebel groups. Obama continued to send mixed signals for more than a year. It was not until late August that events finally focused his mind. A poison-gas attack near Damascus left hundreds of Syrian civilians dead.
But then, with his finger on the trigger, he backed away under the guise of seeking authorization from a Congress he knew to be opposed. To domestic critics, including some in his own administration, it was an embarrassing flip-flop that would surely embolden dictators the world over. But most observers agree that it came about largely through luck. In the years since, the Syrian war has continued to absorb new players and damage everything in its path. The Obama administration is in deeper, though only to fight isis. The Russians are fighting for Assad, the Turks against him; the Kurds are in the middle.
One of his favorite foreign leaders, Angela Merkel, has shared his concerns about intervention all along. But she has balanced her wariness with a much more generous embrace of Syrian refugees. It is not too late for him to follow her example. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim. I meant what I said. But this was not a gaffe. I think normal human responses, basic courtesy, are not checked at the door when you become president.
Where are there opportunities to think big? So I had already assigned our team to start exploring what that might look like and how we might structure it. And then it started late and it was pouring rain and security issues were a challenge. And so the handshake with Castro was actually pretty spontaneous. For me not to shake his hand would have been an inappropriate gesture at a funeral. So I shook his hand.
It was me shaking the hand of an older man who was sitting on the stage when I was doing a eulogy. At that point we had already begun to have some contact with the Cuban government and were thinking about what might happen. They interpreted that handshake and my willingness to do that on the world stage as a signal of greater seriousness. And so it did, I think, facilitate the series of negotiations that took place. On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future.
He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House. The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.
Cantor and his political team never took Brat, a little-known economics professor, as a serious threat.
More than two years later, the two have still not spoken. In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police and to more white people than anyone is willing to admit , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation.
Simultaneously and not coincidentally, Black Lives Matter and Black Twitter have unleashed a vocabulary that white America is now actively recruiting: Black people are reinventing mainstream vernacular and setting the tone for cultural dialogue. All of this in parallel to viral video after viral video of black bodies young and old, shot and killed, beaten or pinned to the ground with a knee in the back, knocked out of a school desk.
The spectrum of anti-black racism is extreme — from microaggression to monkey memes to murder. But so is the spectrum of black achievement. In the past few years, black America has harnessed centuries of pent-up capacity and shot it out of a cannon. I remember speaking with the president about how the administration should respond.
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So we made the determination that I would go. It was high risk because we were, in essence, putting the prestige of the Justice Department, the attorney general, and potentially the administration on the line, and if the trip proved to be unsuccessful, if the protests continued in a violent way, that would have been very problematic. I had to be visible. We took Air Force Two, the plane normally used by the vice-president. I remember there was a TV on the plane. It had a picture of the plane that I was on landing in Ferguson.
CNN was covering the landing of the plane, and we landed and people from my staff were getting off. What struck me about the day was there was consistency from the residents there, young and old, black and white. When the report was done by folks in our civil-rights division, they found that the police department or the criminal-justice system was being used as a way to generate money for the local government. I remember at the community meeting, there was a woman who was expressing concerns about whether we would conduct a really fair, impartial, independent investigation, and I assured her that we would.
But I think it was the right thing to do. The decision to go was one that I made with the president. We always talk about the value of diversity, and the fact that you had two black men looking at that situation and being impacted in the way that we were, as both public officials and black men — I think that might have impacted the final determination that I should go. I think it certainly was part of the calculus, never spoken, never said, between us. But I think it was something that had an influence on me, on him. It was not something we ever talked about since then, but I suspect that at some level, it was a factor.
That was the Obama years: Eight years can be an eternity or an instant in music. This class restored a sense of artistic autonomy following the producer-Svengali era of the mid-aughts with Timbaland, the Neptunes, Irv Gotti, and the like. But it was more than just new musical auteurism: A different kind of pop star was forged in the Obama years, one that attempts to juggle the spectacle of song and dance with internet savvy and caring advocacy.
Many stars effortlessly nail two of the three. The Hive can build and nurture, but dissidents get stung, and hard. But the brilliance of Black-ish was that, as much as its timeliness made it a cultural landmark, it was also pretty timeless. Black America has always needed Black-ish, just as white America has always needed Seinfeld or Sex and the City ; like its s predecessor, The Cosby Show, Black-ish is essentially about the ordinariness of black family life, even if that ordinariness occasionally means staring down race-specific quandaries: What do you teach your black children about use of the N-word?
How do you straddle multiple roles in society and navigate a shaky proximity to blackness and whiteness that threatens to erase facets of your own cultural identity? Or post-class America, for that matter. Tom Frieden, the head of CDC, briefed us with a chart that basically blew all of our minds and predicted that by January , we could have up to 1. We needed to surge treatment facilities. We needed to surge logistics support.
We needed to surge health-care workers. And to do all of that, we concluded that [we would need] the deployment of U. The president felt that it was his job to be the voice of reason. Every plane that came from West Africa or every person who might be from West Africa was potentially carrying Ebola. There were calls to shut the borders and to prevent all West Africans from coming to the United States. There were calls in Congress for the same, and it was really kind of getting crazy and overheated. By the end of November, we had bent the curve. And rather than 1. His death is the latest killing of an unarmed black man — or, in this case, a child — to fuel a national outrage, as well as private pain for the friends and families left behind.
In the age of the hacker, privacy is a thing of the past. Because even though we know these things are none of our business, were illegally obtained, and are flat-out unethical to view, it can still be hard to resist. After all, what good does it do? This is the unexpected, chilling reality of the information age: The second some intriguing bit of content hits the internet, it is distributed exponentially and will live on indefinitely. Not only will every word from the Sony hack of , the Ashley Madison hack of , and the Colin Powell email hack from this summer be accessible for years to come, but any of the personal information hacked from corporate and government databases Anthem, the IRS, the Federal Office of Personnel Management, Swift, and Yahoo could wind up online, too.
But then, sometimes playing dumb is the guiltiest pleasure of all. Google has a biotech company that aims to beat death at its game. Technological optimism in California is a natural resource, like oil in the Middle East, seemingly inexhaustible, a motive force of the economy, and not a little bad for the environment. They tend toward a sunny libertarianism, they read relatively few novels, they love productivity tips, and they occasionally propose — so valuable are its pearls — that California secede from the Union, the better to disrupt the world.
Pitch an app and a venture capitalist yawns. What they want is the market, the whole shebang. Google launched its own trading floor in , you know? The media tends to make this whole digital revolution a battle between Silicon Valley and, well, the media. The implosion of the media industry is really just collateral damage. Silicon Valley wants to be the fun Wall Street, the market where all must come, taking a few pennies with every transaction.
The idea that Silicon Valley could mint currency was almost pornographically exciting. To seduce a VC, whisper the word arbitrage into his pink, pink ear. To them, bitcoin was like a catchy earworm; once they heard it, they had to hear it again and again. You make the money yourself … with the computer? You mint cash … with computation?
You no longer had to find a link between ever-faster central processing units and the global economy?
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868—1963)
The fast computer is the economy and things are looking uuuuuuuup. And predictably, they lost their minds. African-American women have been burdened with a reputation for anger, aggression, masculinity, and inhuman strength since their arrival in the Colonial United States. The stereotype was used to explain why enslaved African women, unlike the delicate moneyed white women they served, were able to endure the lash, grueling work, rape, and sexual exploitation.
It was more complicated to saddle the biracial candidate Barack Obama, son of a bohemian white mother from Kansas, raised in Hawaii by white grandparents, with being a source of simmering racial resentment. Though plenty certainly tried. That was on the nice end of things. And she has challenged Fallon to a push-up contest, embracing her strength in defiance of those who question her femininity. She is, according to Gallup, a First Lady with favorability ratings that, on average, have exceeded those of her predecessors.
For every person who endorses a stereotypical characterization of Michelle Obama, many more have been moved by her obvious humanity to walk away from broken narratives about her and all black women. When I started my last book in the early aughts, people to whom I mentioned the trans kids I was writing about were astonished that they existed; some were appalled by what they took to be a precocious sexual perversion. It is now accepted that you are who you say you are.
Trans and gay are not the same thing experientially, but they have been amalgamated politically under the now-dominant LGBTQ banner — a necessity given the much larger number of gay people than trans people. But that very acronym speaks to diversity within this embracing queer community and acceptance of that diversity outside it.
How did it happen? I welcomed this new president, but I mourned Proposition 8 passing in California, revoking the right to marriage where it had already been granted; grieved over the state constitutional amendments in Florida and Arizona that made gay marriage illegal. But the setback turned out to be galvanizing. The coherence the movement for gay rights had achieved as it fought disease was now focused on seeking acceptance, and through a bewildering alchemy, the test case became marriage.
I used to be ashamed of being gay. For all that I put on a good show of pride, I used to feel I was making the most of an unfortunate situation. Partly, that changed because I grew up, achieved self-acceptance, met my husband, and had kids, all of which salved the regret. But also, the world stopped pitying me. The external validation of the class of human beings to which I belong has worked a subtle magic. Our assertions of pride have finally achieved that pride. Then, one by one, longtime members would share their sexuality.
That, more than any magic verse in the Bible, began to make it more possible for us to have gay people be deacon or teach a Bible-study class. The last hurdle for us, though, was same-sex weddings. Why would we get married somewhere else? But they never said it in a way that was like blackmail. They were so gracious in saying yes.
We lost some families over this. And we miss those folks, but we had to move on. I went with his parents.
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As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The initial meeting in Geneva had a little bit of posturing and some resistance.
There had been months of negotiations leading up to that. And we had to keep Congress briefed, we kept Israel briefed. We were asking for a very substantial rollback of the nuclear enterprise, in return for political-slash-economic concessions on the other side. And the technical knowledge did matter.
For [Iranian nuclear head Ali Akbar] Salehi, what was very important is that they were not entirely eliminating activities.
EIGHT YEARS IN AMERICA
So, they still get to run some centrifuges for enrichment, but only the old ones. We would write on whiteboards. But I would never pocket something until we came back the next time and it was still there, since Salehi would have to go talk to his teams and maybe get pushed one way or another. On April 2, we got the interim agreement nailed. We were cornered into that by the imminent potential of Congress passing additional sanctions, which would have blown the whole thing apart.
The people who were opposed to it were passing a lot of disinformation around. And so we needed to go public with the outlines of the deal. But we plowed ahead. Getting to that last one was tougher. I remember we all had planned to be home for the Fourth of July. The first of July came, the third of July, the Fourth of July.
My problem was I was still in a gingerly state. We had to prop my leg up under the table. There were moments when I thought these guys just were not serious. But the alternative to this genuinely was a road to conflict. The deal really does have to be judged in a hard-nosed way on the peaceful-uses-of-nuclear-energy basis. Unless you were a member of a small number of families in New York City, it would have been very rare over the past century to open up a newspaper and find, between international news and entertainment gossip, pictures of your new nephew or a wedding announcement for a middle-school classmate.
But we live in the future now, and this alarming, alienating, and totally compelling collage of news, gossip, hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and videos featuring two different species of animals becoming friends is the conventional way to get information. Where Google requires you to seek out the news you want, Facebook will serve up relevant content the minute you open up the app. Ties Russia to Strike on U. Meanwhile, newspapers, magazines, and digital publishers jockey for space alongside small businesses, enthusiast groups, multinational conglomerates, actors, DJs, models, actor-DJs, model-DJs, and users like yourself.
Who needs to search for news or, worse, rely on editors! The result is less a media landscape peacefully democratized than one violently razed, its great edifices stripped for parts and its gatekeepers reduced to shrieking mendicants. The hacker dystopia Mr. For years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: What is common to these struggles — and what makes their resolution an urgent matter — is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth.
This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows. A dubious story about Cameron and a pig appears in a tabloid one morning, and by noon, it has flown around the world on social media and turned up in trusted news sources everywhere.
This may seem like a small matter, but its consequences are enormous. There are usually several conflicting truths on any given subject, but in the era of the printing press, words on a page nailed things down, whether they turned out to be true or not. The information felt like the truth, at least until the next day brought another update or a correction, and we all shared a common set of facts. This arrangement was not without flaws: Now, people distrust much of what is presented as fact — particularly if the facts in question are uncomfortable, or out of sync with their own views — and while some of that distrust is misplaced, some of it is not.
In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true — as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real time. Trusted news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales. Sometimes rumours like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime pays people to convey their message. But in less than five years, thanks to the incredible power of a few social platforms, the filter bubble that Pariser described has become much more extreme.
On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid illustration of the power of the filter bubble — and the serious civic consequences for a world where information flows largely through social networks:. F acebook, which launched only in , now has 1. It has become the dominant way for people to find news on the internet — and in fact it is dominant in ways that would have been impossible to imagine in the newspaper era.
As Emily Bell has written: It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. Bell, the director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University — and a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian — has outlined the seismic impact of social media for journalism.
Publications curated by editors have in many cases been replaced by a stream of information chosen by friends, contacts and family, processed by secret algorithms. The old idea of a wide-open web — where hyperlinks from site to site created a non-hierarchical and decentralised network of information — has been largely supplanted by platforms designed to maximise your time within their walls, some of which such as Instagram and Snapchat do not allow outward links at all.
Many people, in fact, especially teenagers, now spend more and more of their time on closed chat apps , which allow users to create groups to share messages privately — perhaps because young people, who are most likely to have faced harassment online, are seeking more carefully protected social spaces.
But the closed space of a chat app is an even more restrictive silo than the walled garden of Facebook or other social networks. Of course, Facebook does not decide what you read — at least not in the traditional sense of making decisions — and nor does it dictate what news organisations produce. But when one platform becomes the dominant source for accessing information, news organisations will often tailor their own work to the demands of this new medium. The most extreme manifestation of this phenomenon has been the creation of fake news farms, which attract traffic with false reports that are designed to look like real news, and are therefore widely shared on social networks.
Of course, journalists have got things wrong in the past — either by mistake or prejudice or sometimes by intent. So it would be a mistake to think this is a new phenomenon of the digital age. But what is new and significant is that today, rumours and lies are read just as widely as copper-bottomed facts — and often more widely, because they are wilder than reality and more exciting to share. The cynicism of this approach was expressed most nakedly by Neetzan Zimmerman, formerly employed by Gawker as a specialist in high-traffic viral stories.
The increasing prevalence of this approach suggests that we are in the midst of a fundamental change in the values of journalism — a consumerist shift. But the trouble is that the business model of most digital news organisations is based around clicks. That used to go to news publishers. In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same — whether they come from a credible source or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible sources are also publishing false, misleading, or deliberately outrageous stories.
We should be careful not to dismiss anything with an appealing digital headline as clickbait — appealing headlines are a good thing, if they lead the reader to quality journalism, both serious and not. My belief is that what distinguishes good journalism from poor journalism is labour: As the American political reporter Dave Weigel wrote in the wake of a hoax story that became a viral hit all the way back in It has meant we have found new ways to get stories — from our audience, from data, from social media.
It has given us new ways to tell stories — with interactive technologies and now with virtual reality. It has given us new ways to distribute our journalism, to find new readers in surprising places; and it has given us new ways to engage with our audiences, opening ourselves up to challenge and debate. But while the possibilities for journalism have been strengthened by the digital developments of the last few years, the business model is under grave threat, because no matter how many clicks you get, it will never be enough. And if you charge readers to access your journalism you have a big challenge to persuade the digital consumer who is used to getting information for free to part with their cash.
News publishers everywhere are seeing profits and revenue drop dramatically. If you want a stark illustration of the new realities of digital media, consider the first-quarter financial results announced by the New York Times and Facebook within a week of one another earlier this year. He shows that the meaning of the religion is that it constitutes a special place where the kind of community and life for African-Americans can be attained that the white world denies them.
Religion has had to become a refuge, but also at the same time a source of genuine freedom of expression and creativity. Chapter 11, which is very moving, recounts the birth and loss of Du Bois' own son as an instance of his own struggle against white culture. Here Du Bois laments that his newborn, innocent son will soon have to cross into the color line of hateful American prejudice.
Chapters 12 and 13 discuss the struggles that great African-American souls had to deal with to become more fully appreciated, including a narrative about a man named John who defended his sister against dishonor only to be met with horrible racism as a result.
Chapter 14, the last chapter, closes with a rich discussion of African-American music in which Du Bois points to this music as an emblem of the possible brighter future in which African-Americans become co-workers in American culture. Such music is the symbol of this better future in which African-Americans contribute to the culture since it is, after all, he claims, the only genuinely beautiful music that has come out of America to date, and reveals what African-Americans can accomplish. Thus, Du Bois provides us with multiple instances of double consciousness. In each case, African-Americans are shown to be struggling to achieve themselves, due to the enforced divisions and roadblocks of white culture.
What Du Bois presents here are short, powerful looks at the struggle to be recognized as fully human, a struggle due to the horrible crime of racism. The concept of double consciousness plays itself out in a variety of waysfrom the agonizing worry a father feels in raising his son in a white world to the failed policies of segregation and the creation of ghettos in American citiesalways with the same devastating effect, the compromising of identity, and yet with a new identity that is forming and emerging.
The African-American is forced to struggle to be him- or herself in America, Du Bois shows, but they have done so heroically and with deep humanity throughout their plight. Some Du Bois interpreters Higgins have found parallels between Du Bois' conception of double consciousness and Nietzsche's conception of the free spirit, or the man who stands apart. The idea is that in both cases someone within the culture is at the same time able to stand outside of it. But as we have seen above, beyond this general notion, Du Bois clearly develops his concept of double consciousness in the context of African-Americans specifically.
Nor does he favor this sense of division in the way that Nietzsche sometimes seems to do but rather he actively seeks to overcome it. The overall implication of Souls is that such enforced separation of consciousness as occurs in the case of African-Americans is wrong; it violates something fundamental about the human condition, and it ruins our republic, by preventing us from forming the best use of our talents by drawing on the strengths of all races. We must work together to attain a greater sense of personhood for the members of our culture.
Du Bois' other major philosophical concept is that of "second sight. Du Bois holds that due to their double consciousness, African-Americans possess a privileged epistemological perspective. Both inside the white world and outside of it, African-Americans are able to understand the white world, while yet perceiving it from a different perspective, namely that of an outsider as well.
The white person in America, by contrast, contains but a single consciousness and perspective, for he or she is a member of a dominant culture, with its own racial and cultural norms asserted as absolute. The white person looks out from themselves and sees only their own world reflected back upon thema kind of blindness or singular sight possesses them. Luckily, as Du Bois makes clear, the dual perspective of African-Americans can be used to grasp the essence of whiteness and to expose it, in the multiple senses of the word "expose.
The destruction of "whiteness" in this way leaves whites open to the experience of African-Americans, as a privileged perspective, and hence it also leaves African-Americans with a breach in the culture through which they could enter with their legitimate, and legitimating, perspectives. In a particularly important essay of Dark Water, called "The Souls of White Folk," Du Bois reveals some of the wisdom of his race's privileged perspective.
As Du Bois sees it, whites see themselves a certain way, namely as superior, civilized, perfect, beneficent, and called upon to help other peoples with their higher wisdom. But, in truth, as African-Americans can perceive quite plainly, whites are actually imperialistic, ugly, greedy, and corrupt in their practices.
Whites are imprisoned in their own false self-conception. Their own seriousness with themselves contrasts sharply with the reality that African-Americans see. What they see, above all, is that white society consists not of higher wisdom but only of "mutilation and rape masquerading as culture" Darkwater , Du Bois makes his claims more pointed and specific by noting that the concept of "whiteness" is what we might today call a social construct. It is a concept that developed in the late nineteenth century and in the twentieth century.
Before that, various societies hardly made much of differences in skin color. What is significant about this fact is that it shows whiteness as a category to emerge simultaneously with the development of industrialism and its counterpart colonialism. Western peoples wanted the material resources of the third world, and so they invented the myth of their own superiority based on skin color, and the supposed inferiority of dark peoples, in order to assist them in their desire to steal. Based on such maneuvers as these, the third world was conquered, dark peoples were murdered, raped, and exploited, and white culture became rich.
This wealth and power in turn gave whites a sense of superiority. But this sense of superiority is undone by the tragic-comic self-conception whites have of themselves as superior simply because they are white, when in fact they are bound to a false, invented self-conception based on color, one that only serves to assist in murder and exploitation.
The supposedly civilized concept of "whiteness" in truth sinks into barbarism and insatiable world conquest. And it is this, precisely, that whites cannot see about themselves, but must learn to see, if the problem of the twentieth century, the problem of the color line, is to be overcome and the races are to create together a greater and truer democracy. As he put it in his autobiography, "I now state my conclusion frankly and clearly: I believe in communism.
I mean by communism, a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part" Autobiography , Du Bois came to believe that the economic condition of Africans and African-Americans was one of the primary modes of their oppression, and that a more equitable distribution of wealth, as advanced by Marx, was the remedy to the situation. Du Bois was not simply a follower of Marx, however.
He also added keen insights to the communist tradition himself. One of his contributions is his insistence that communism contains no explicit means of liberating Africans and African-Americans, but that it ought to focus its attentions here and work toward this end. Without their liberation and motive force in the production of communism, it cannot be achieved. It is the rise of these people that is the rise of the world" Black Folk , A further contribution Du Bois makes is to show how Utopian politics such as communism is possible in the first place.
Building on Engle's claim that freedom lies in the acknowledgment of necessity, as Maynard Solomon argues Solomon, "Introduction" , because in grasping necessity we accurately perceive what areas of life are open to free action , Du Bois insists on the power of dreams. Admitting our bound nature bound to our bellies, bound to material conditions , even stressing it, he nonetheless emphasizes our range of powers within these constraints. In a lecture called "The Nature of Intellectual Freedom" that he delivered to the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in , using language that anticipates Jean-Paul Sartre , Du Bois calls attention to "the upsurging emotions," the mind's ability to go beyond what is present Also like Sartre, Du Bois attempts to employ this power behalf of socialism.
As Du Bois sees it, the human mind has the ability to take flight into "infinite freedoms" "The Nature," This "upsurging" ability of mind is vital to bringing about socialism, for it allows us to dream of what life and social conditions might be as compared to what they currently are Solomon, "Introduction," If properly cultivated, it allows us to see beyond the supposed necessity of the capitalist system, which everywhere presents itself, falsely, as the only way.
There is, as Du Bois points out "The Nature," , and Solomon confirms Solomon, "Introduction," , a "borderland" region in which compulsion and freedom meet. We must gain food, seek shelter, and raise our children. Necessity and liberty meet each other half way in this region, each pulling in their own direction, yet oftentimes working together. Our leaders take advantage of this region. They enforce necessity to work hard and to work in order to eatin order, ultimately, to stifle individual freedom and its meanderings, its free decisions; and they promote ignorance of conditions in order to make us more beholden to them.
However, there is hope in the fact that freedom also operates in this border region and that our minds can shape a part of what occurs in this region. Socialism must focus here and nurture this hope. It must promote, above all, "the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls," that our dreams might someday lead to better realities "The Nature," Although difficult to characterize in general terms, Du Bois' philosophy amounts to a programmatic shift away from abstraction and toward engaged, social criticism.
In affecting this change in philosophy, especially on behalf of African-Americans and pertaining to the issue of race, Du Bois adds concrete significance and urgent application to American Pragmatism, as Cornel West maintains, a philosophy that is about social criticism, not about grasping absolute timeless truth. Du Bois' work has also been essential for Africana Critical Theory, and has influenced a host of thinkers in this tradition, as Rabaka has shown.
Authors have often compared Du Bois' work to that of Frantz Fanon in its call to overcome global race prejudice and to liberate Africa. In addition, Du Bois' philosophy was a focus point for some of the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Du Bois' philosophy has also contributed significantly to critical race theory, especially his article, "The Conservation of Races," in which Du Bois argues, echoing Souls , that there is some real meaning to race, even if it is difficult precisely to define Conservation, As Robert Bernasconi makes clear, Du Bois is a central figure in the debate about the nature of race because he has triggered an intense discussion about the extent to which there is a biological basis to race and the extent to which social and cultural features define race as well "Introduction,"