Zeynep Tufekci recently wrote in the Times. “YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”

Zeynep's law: Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude.

Dr. Tufekci’s new cause is ventilation; her vehicle is The Atlantic, which gave her a contract after she had contributed to The Times as a freelancer for many years. Ironically, just as the Times opinion department was tearing itself apart over the charge that amplifying a senator’s views could endanger protesters, the one writer who had certainly saved lives slipped out a side door.

Mutual aid societies were built on the razed foundations of the old  guilds, and cooperatives and mass political parties then drew on the  experience of the mutual aid societies."

Some news: there will be a free creative commons copy of my book. It will be available as a free PDF download in addition to being sold as a bound book. This is with the hopes that anyone who wants to read it can do so without worrying about the cost. However, this also means that I need to ask that a few people who can afford to do so to please consider purchasing a copy. This is not just so that Yale University Press can do this for more authors, but also because if it is not sold (at least a little bit!) in the initial few weeks, bookstores will not stock it and online algorithms will show it to fewer people. No sales will mean less visibility, and less incentive for publishers to allow other authors creative commons copies.