Tag: little idea
You Should Worry About the Data Retailers Collect About You
A man walks into a Minneapolis-area Target, angry about coupons his teenage daughter received for baby clothes and cribs. “Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” he asks a store manager. Except, his daughter really was pregnant. Target had tuned a marketing-prediction model so tightly that it could successfully tell what was happening inside her body, before even the girl’s family knew.
This story, relayed by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times in 2012, is one of
Christopher Rufo’s Theory of Change
Christopher F. Rufo is what is sometimes known as a shit-stirrer—a particular type of troublemaker whose game is to find something stinky, then waft its fumes toward the noses of those mostly likely to be outraged by it. In the past several years, controversies over race, gender, and campus leftism have ripened in part due to his publicity. Often the so-called antiracists, trans activists, and tenured radicals at the center of the controversies are self-discrediting. All Rufo has to do
Barack Obama on Disinformation and Ukraine
When they last sat down for an interview, in November 2020, Barack Obama told Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg that disinformation is “the single biggest threat to our democracy.” The threat was not a new one, he said, but it was accelerating. It has continued to accelerate since. A month and a half after that conversation, a violent mob stormed the Capitol, driven by the false belief that the election had been stolen from Donald Trump and