Tamsin Shaw

Flacking for Facebook

How perfect that a failed Liberal Democrat should be leading the PR effort to persuade us that liberal democracy is safe with the social media giant.

The Race for Biodata Amid a Pandemic

The gold standard for predictive biodata in the Covid-19 pandemic is the DNA information of affected populations. Yet America’s response to the public health crisis has exposed a shocking lack of preparedness.

William Barr: The Carl Schmitt of Our Time

For Hitler’s favorite jurist, laws derived not from moral principles but from sovereign authority, which gives the US attorney general’s defense of unchecked executive power an unpleasant familiarity.

The Oligarch Threat

Perhaps it’s too much to expect a Netflix documentary to accomplish what the special counsel, with all the resources of federal prosecutors and FBI investigators at his disposal, also failed to account for.

Edward Snowden Reconsidered

Snowden speaks often, and he uses his platform. So whether we trust him matters. And it certainly matters if we conclude that he is a well-intentioned whistleblower who has shown bad judgment and has allowed himself to become an unwitting pawn of the Russians.

The New Military-Industrial Complex

The revelations about Cambridge Analytica should prompt us to ask deeper questions about the kind of behavioral science research that enables both governments and private companies to develop influence techniques for psychological warfare.

Beware the Big Five

‘The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace’ by Alexander Klimburg

The Bitter Secret of ‘Wormwood’

Whatever conclusion we draw about Frank Olson’s death, we do know that the cold war bequeathed a branch of behavioral science built around the desire to discover universal psychological mechanisms through which human beings could be manipulated.

The Universe in a Nutshell

The viewer who expects merely to marvel at technical virtuosity of the breathtakingly intricate gothic boxwood miniatures currently exhibited at the Cloisters will be unprepared for what awaits.

Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind

‘The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds’ by Michael Lewis

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Choosing Evil

On the freedom and exhilaration of moral insensibility.

‘Learned Helplessness’ & Torture: An Exchange

Moral Psychology: An Exchange

The Psychologists Take Power

We should be wary of conferring moral authority on sources that have no plausible claims to such authority

In Search of 'Fidelio'

For the obsessive seeker of meaning, contemporary opera productions can make for some difficult evenings. Watching the Salzburg production of *Fidelio*, directed by Claus Guth, I was not shocked, but a little perplexed.

‘A History of Genius’

Darrin McMahon’s ‘Divine Fury: A History of Genius’

Nietzsche: ‘The Lightning Fire’