[Joseph Holt] I’m in an abusive relationship with Facebook, and it’s becoming too much

With true friends, the more you learn about each other the more you like, trust and want to spend time with each other. With Facebook, the more I learn about their cavalier attitude toward users’ personal data, the more I don’t like, trust or want to spend time with them.　And the more I read about Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of the private data of more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission, the more stomach-turning I find it that the company celebrated its Feb. 4 anniversa

March 25, 2018

[Barry Ritholtz] Before you #DeleteFacebook, try taking control

#DeleteFacebook is trending on social media. 　But you don’t have to do anything as radical as deleting the app that keeps you in touch with friends, family members and so many Russian bots. Instead, consider taking full control of your account. A few steps can eliminate Facebook as a nefarious actor in your life, wrestling it into submission as a benign app.　I have been a skeptic about Facebook pretty much from the beginning -- it’s likely a generational thing. I have had issues with the lack of

March 23, 2018

[Daniel Moss] What China revealed in its national congress

In China, don’t forget the ones that got away.　This month’s session of the National People’s Congress, the legislature that typically rubber stamps the Communist Party’s wishes, made plenty of headlines on personnel and policies. Also telling is what didn’t happen and who didn’t get what job.　Notable omissions send important signals on what type of economy the incoming cabinet envisages and how much latitude the central bank, itself under new leadership, will have to steer it.The broader task fo

March 22, 2018

[Virginia Heffernan] A real recovery option for sexual abusers

Last Monday, James Levine, the longtime music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, was fired after the Met investigated his history of sexual abuse of young men, including teenagers. Levine sued the Met for $5.8 million for breach of contract and defamation.　Last Tuesday, a report surfaced that five women had accused the architect Richard Meier of groping, exhibitionism, assault and paying for silence. “While our recollections may differ,” Meier said in a statement, “I sincerely apolo

March 22, 2018

[Carl P. Leubsdorf] Top political leaders beginning to sound out of touch

For three of the nation’s most prominent political figures, today is still yesterday. Two years later, they’re still re-fighting the 2016 campaign.　President Donald Trump is constantly replaying -- and exaggerating -- his 2016 success, as if he needs to convince himself he really did win, and did so without the help that even some Republicans concede he got from Vladimir Putin.Similarly, Hillary Clinton is still trying to explain why she lost what should have been a sure thing. She’s blaming alm

March 22, 2018

[Los Angeles Times] Gina Haspel’s appointment to run the CIA revives America’s dark history of torture

Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s choice to take over the CIA, is a well-respected figure within the intelligence community, by most accounts. But she is inextricably tied to two very dark elements of the spy agency’s past: She ran a secret, post-Sept. 11 overseas “black site” where detainees were subjected to torture, and she participated in the willful destruction of 90 videotapes of some of those interrogation sessions.　Her role in those shameful moments in American history must be centra

March 21, 2018

[Mark Buchanan] Want to stop climate change? Take ‘em to court!

Climate change is profoundly unfair: By failing to address it, today’s leaders are imposing what could prove to be an unbearable burden on future generations. But how can they be made to recognize the danger and act? Using the US legal system, a group of children has found a novel way to do so.　The 2015 Paris Agreement on reducing carbon emissions looked like a big step forward in addressing global warming. But since then, the US has pulled out, and many other governments have fallen short. Tota

March 21, 2018

[Leonid Bershidsky] Facebook is real problem, not Cambridge Analytica

Facebook is being hammered for allowing data firm Cambridge Analytica to acquire 50 million user profiles in the US, which it may or may not have used to help the Trump campaign. But the outrage misses the target: There’s nothing Cambridge Analytica could have done that Facebook itself doesn’t offer political clients.　Here, in a nutshell, is the scandal. In 2014, Aleksandr Kogan, an academic of Russian origin at Cambridge University in the UK, built a Facebook app that paid hundreds of thousands

March 21, 2018

[Noah Feldman] Pros and cons of Trump’s random foreign policy

Suppose President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is random. I mean really random: Like random luck, designed only in so far as to fluctuate wildly between different, opposing strategic views.　In this thought experiment, it’s not a bug but a feature that the US is pulling away from a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Iran even as it seeks to negotiate one with North Korea. Similarly, it’s an intentional accident that Trump might replace the realist national security adviser H.R. McMaster wit

March 20, 2018

[David Hoffman] “Huge” trade deficits are smaller than you think

There are many good economic reasons why President Donald Trump is wrong to obsess over the US trade deficit with China. One is that this bilateral deficit isn’t as severe as he thinks -- and, in any case, the structural factors that caused the imbalance in the first place are changing. Before launching a US-China trade war, the White House needs a more accurate picture of how the world, in fact, trades.　America’s goods deficit with China indeed hit a record level last year -- around $375 billio

March 20, 2018

[Jeffrey Frankel] Is technology hurting productivity?

In recent years, productivity growth in developed economies has been stagnating. The most prominent explanations of this trend involve technology. Technological progress is supposed to increase economies’ productivity and potential growth. So what’s going on?Harvard’s economist Martin Feldstein has argued persuasively that productivity growth is actually higher than we realize, because government statistics “grossly understate the value of improvements in the quality of existing goods and servic

March 20, 2018