Revenge Porn Is Malicious and Reprehensible. But Should It Be a Crime? Revenge Porn Is Malicious and Reprehensible. But Should It Be a Crime?
The line between respecting civil liberties and protecting victims is anything but clear.
Oct 1, 2014 / Michelle Goldberg
Bangladeshi Workers Organize to Protect Their Most Valuable Export: Themselves Bangladeshi Workers Organize to Protect Their Most Valuable Export: Themselves
Migrant domestic workers from Bangladesh enjoy little protection from their government, but they’re not alone.
Oct 1, 2014 / Tiffany Williams and Foreign Policy In Focus
The Death of the Blackout Rule, and Why the NFL Fights On The Death of the Blackout Rule, and Why the NFL Fights On
The FCC ruled 5-0 against the NFL, showing that their stranglehold over government and fans could be coming to an end.
Oct 1, 2014 / Dave Zirin
Eric Holder’s Mixed Record Eric Holder’s Mixed Record
The attorney general was a champion of civil rights—but not civil liberties.
Oct 1, 2014 / The Editors
7 GOP Governors Who May Lose Re-Election 7 GOP Governors Who May Lose Re-Election
Their extremist policies have made them so vulnerable that corporate America is scrambling to save them.
Oct 1, 2014 / John Nichols
A Tale of One City by David Brooks A Tale of One City by David Brooks
For one-percenters like the Times columnist, city life has never been better.
Oct 1, 2014 / Column / Eric Alterman
Minority Report Minority Report
Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an era in which information has finally become “free”—unlimited media access, twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data. A new report shows that when Big Data creeps into our workplaces and our financial lives, it may simply create new ways of reinforcing old racial and economic injustices. The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future,” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, notes that technological advances, the declining cost of data storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America have spurred massive data collection. This accumulation of private information by corporations and government has created troubling new issues in the areas of labor rights, privacy and ethics. Consider the influence of Big Data on hiring practices. Hiring algorithms are often seen as an “objective,” meritocratic assessment, free of irrational prejudice or biases. But the report warns that because “[d]igital indicators of race, religion, or sexual preference can easily be observed or inferred online,” the mining of social media and Google-search data can reinforce systemic discrimination. The result may be a perpetuation of an unjust status quo: disproportionately white, upper-class, elite-educated and culturally homogeneous. Sloppy résumé scans end up excluding people based on superficial criteria—where they live, for example, a metric bound to reflect already-existing housing discrimination. Big Data manipulation allows these subtle individual slights to be expanded to new orders of magnitude with monstrous efficiency. Since the algorithm reflects social patterns, researcher David Robinson tells The Nation, “any time someone is the victim of old-fashioned human discrimination, that discrimination is likely to be reflected in some of the data points that these new algorithms measure. Culturally speaking, there is a real tendency to defer to decisions that come from computers—which means if we’re not careful, it is reasonable to expect that computers will sanitize biased inputs into neutral-seeming outputs.” Read Next: David Auerbach on data profiling and microtargeting
Oct 1, 2014 / Michelle Chen
Comix Nation Comix Nation
Oct 1, 2014 / Matt Bors
Run, Karen, Run! Run, Karen, Run!
Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis is eyeing Mayor Emanuel’s job.
Oct 1, 2014 / Column / Gary Younge
The Coalition Against ISIS The Coalition Against ISIS
The White House talks of burden-shifting, But guess who’ll do the heavy lifting? If bombs won’t turn this thing around, Whose boots will those be on the ground?
Oct 1, 2014 / Column / Calvin Trillin