"Many of these people are educated, and hold jobs or positions that give them some form of power or influence over Black people."

From Mars to the metaverse, tech moguls are forging a new kind of capitalism: an extreme, extraterrestrial version.

Does imposing the death penalty lower rates of violent crime? What economic policies will lead to broad prosperity? Which medical treatments should we allow and encourage to treat novel diseases? These questions have a few things in common. They bear important consequences for us all, and so policymakers and the public would like to know the answers – if good answers even exist.

Just like our education and healthcare systems, our information supply has been heavily commercialised in the past decades. Truth has become a product, aimed at satisfying a need. The advent of digital capitalism turned truth into whatever makes you click.

When I attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2002-3, the leadership training was excellent. It included discussion of the British Army’s values and the laws of armed conflict. However, I received no ethics training for the occasions when neither values nor laws would fully prepare me to make complex moral decisions in faraway fields populated by people with very different cultural norms.

Over the last few months, Select All has interviewed more than a dozen prominent technology figures about what has gone wrong with the contemporary internet for a project called “The Internet Apologizes.” We’re now publishing lengthier transcripts of each individual interview. This interview features Dan McComas, the former senior vice-president for product of Reddit and the founder and CEO of Imzy, a community-focused platform.

Jordan Peterson really takes his time setting up his punching bag for the audience at the University of British Columbia’s ‘Free Speech Club’: “I want to talk about intersectionality and white privilege a bit.” The audience whoops and giggles, anticipating exactly what Jordan Peterson will say. It’s the third time he has spoken at the ‘Free Speech Club’ (Nov, 2017) and he’s delivered the same talk, Identity Politics and the Marxist Lie of White Privilege, to neoconservative powerbrokers at the Sovereign Nations conference (Trump Hotel, Washington, 2018).

The worst thing you can say about personal essayists is that they lack a personality. It’s the opposite with Diski. By Christian Lorentzen.

An exchange in Netflix’s “The Center Will Not Hold” shows Didion’s mastery of the journalist’s necessary mental and emotional bifurcation.

Joan Didion’s seminal 1961 Vogue essay on self-respect.

Near the end of J D Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), the novel’s hero Holden Caulfield buys his sister Phoebe a ticket to the carousel in the park and watches her ride it. It begins to rain, and Holden – having spent most of the book in some form of anxiety, disgust or depression – now nearly cries with joy. ‘I was damn near bawling, I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around...

Being unhappy is never wholly to be recommended, but if there is any period of life in which if the mood may be justified and in certain ways important, then it is roughly between the ages of 13 and 20. It is hard to imagine going on to have a successful or even somewhat contented next six decades if one has not been the beneficiary of a good deal of agonising introspection and intense dislocation in this span.

Nathan, a successful lawyer in Manhattan, hardly seems like a candidate for sympathy. His midtown office is smart, his suit is natty and he earns a decent living negotiating contracts and intellectual-property rights for players in the city’s dynamic entertainment industry. Divorced and in his late 40s, he speaks fondly of his teenage children and is delighted with his fiancée, whom he will marry in a few weeks’ time. His life is good, he assures me, and he is thriving in his career.

A reminder that people who possess great wealth in a time of poverty are directly causing that poverty… By A.Q. Smith

Years ago, while I was in Antigua with my family, disaster struck. I ran out of good books. This was before the age of Kindle, so I didn’t have the download option, but even if I’d had it, books via pixels aren’t for me. I need the real thing: a solid slab that I can hold in my hands. And now I was looking at six days in the tropics without a single decent book and nothing but sand and sea and endless food on the horizon.

Picture this. A couple has been dating for a few months — having a great time drinking, talking, shagging and wandering through each other's worlds. They may have even discussed children, and one or both has made it clear they don't want any. The couple's use of contraception has also made implicit their desire to not become pregnant. But in the spirit of "Q: How do you make God laugh? A. Tell her your plans", suddenly, this hypothetical couple is dealing with an unexpected pregnancy.

I lost a child, and yet I chose to become a father again. Is that bravery or stupidity? By Jayson Greene.

‘The good old days’ is a virulent falsehood that infects those whose defences have been weakened by fear and insecurity. Make the world great again!’ thunder the prophets, religious and secular alike, who know our need for mythic comfort in the face of unjust reality. And so, with a paradoxical mix of pride and self-loathing, humanity tells the same story again and again, about the fallen present and a potential return to paradise past – to Hesiod’s idyllic golden age...

If you listen very closely, you can hear it even now: the sound of the human heart beating. Often, in particularly good horror fiction, this sound is the thing that resonates most, the sound of life springing forth from the void of confusion and danger around it. The best horror fiction accounts for the heart’s profound sensitivity — its vulnerability to alarm and suspense — and the best horror writers understand that the heart, as much as the mind, is able to gauge and comprehend the forces, processes, shadows, and shapes of fear.

I wish I had more interesting things to say about Wolf Children. I wish I could dedicate a spiraling essay to unpacking its secrets… but that’s not really the kind of movie it is. The film doesn’t …