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
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
Frequently Bought Together?: Paul Ryan’s Book and Amazon’s Excuse for Screwing Authors Frequently Bought Together?: Paul Ryan’s Book and Amazon’s Excuse for Screwing Authors
Why is it that one of the authors Amazon is choosing not to screw over just happens to be the chair of the House Budget Committee? Coincidence? Or political favoritism?
Sep 30, 2014 / Leslie Savan
The Pretense of Balanced Debate: Behind the Media’s Blackout of Antiwar Views The Pretense of Balanced Debate: Behind the Media’s Blackout of Antiwar Views
Eric on this week's concerts and Reed on the two-party debate that has only one, pro-war side.
Sep 30, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Eric Alterman and Reed Richardson
Colbert: ‘The Cocks on Fox’ Are Wrong About ‘Boobs on the Ground’ Colbert: ‘The Cocks on Fox’ Are Wrong About ‘Boobs on the Ground’
Bolling apologized, he said, because his wife gave him “the look.” Sounds sincere to us!
Sep 26, 2014 / Leslie Savan
Fox: If Obama’s ‘Latte Salute’ Doesn’t Prove He Hates America, His UN Speech Does Fox: If Obama’s ‘Latte Salute’ Doesn’t Prove He Hates America, His UN Speech Does
How dare Obama salute someone without first tossing his coffee cup aside?
Sep 24, 2014 / Leslie Savan
‘Nation’ Prizewinners ‘Nation’ Prizewinners
Nation editors and contributors have been sweeping up the awards lately. Editor and publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel won the 2014 Norman Mailer Prize for Magazine Publishing. The Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, which sponsors the award, said, “Your work with The Nation has taken what was an important voice in the contemporary discourse and turned it into an indispensable one.” Vanden Heuvel also received an Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Medal Award, given to those who have made “a significant contribution to society in the arts, education, citizenship, philanthropy, community services, and other humanitarian concerns….” And vanden Heuvel and The Nation won the 2014 Champion in Activism Award from the Center for Community Change. Other winners include contributing writer Kai Wright, who received the 2014 Salute to Excellence award for investigative reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists for his November 2013 article “Boxed In: How a Criminal Record Keeps You Unemployed for Life”; as well as Gabriel Thompson and Mariya Strauss, who received the 2014 Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communications for their 2013 articles on child labor in the tobacco fields, “Leaves of Poison” and “Dying on the Farm.” The Nation also won a feature-writing award from the Society of the Silurians for our May 2013 special issue, “Bloomberg’s New York: The Gilded City.” Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50! We received two monthly awards this year from the Sidney Hillman Foundation: contributor Moshe Marvit won the March Sidney Award for “The Wages of Crowdwork,” his article on digital pieceworkers; and editor at large Christopher Hayes won the May Sidney Award for “The New Abolitionism,” on climate change. Nick Turse won an Izzy Award for “outstanding achievement in independent media” for his coverage of civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan, including this magazine’s October 2013 special report “America’s Afghan Victims,” which he co-edited with Robert Dreyfuss. Our art critic, Barry Schwabsky, won the 2013 Best Criticism award from the US chapter of the International Association of Art Critics for his book Words for Art: Criticism, History, Theory, Practice, a collection of essays that draws heavily from his Nation columns. And our blogger Mychal Denzel Smith was a finalist in the 2014 Salute to Excellence Awards for Digital Media from the National Association of Black Journalists. We’re also pleased to introduce the new feature “Five Books,” in which brilliant minds of the left recommend new or important books that have shaped their thinking.
Sep 24, 2014 / The Editors
Karl Rove Has a Democratic Candidate for Governor ‘Arrested’ Karl Rove Has a Democratic Candidate for Governor ‘Arrested’
Rove smears again, this time in Kansas.
Sep 22, 2014 / Leslie Savan
Their Brand Is Crisis: For Austerity Hawks, Good News Must Still Be Bad News Their Brand Is Crisis: For Austerity Hawks, Good News Must Still Be Bad News
Eric on this week's concerts and Reed on how austerity hawks are in perpetual debt crisis mode, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Sep 22, 2014 / Eric Alterman and Reed Richardson
Did the UK Media Push Scotland’s ‘No’ Vote? Did the UK Media Push Scotland’s ‘No’ Vote?
Scotland was closely divided on the issue of independence. But media cast a loud “no” vote.
Sep 19, 2014 / John Nichols