Category: global

  • Quite Careless Indeed

    Quite Careless Indeed

    Sarah Wynn-Williams’s (2025) book Careless People is offered as a memoir of her six years at Meta (Facebook), but it focuses as much on the people whose decisions created this company, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was reportedly hired to appease the Trump administration. Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat,…

  • Reality TV and Me

    Reality TV and Me

    I recently finished Emily Nussbaum’s (2024) second book — Cue the Sun! — for a book club. Others have considered this book to be an accessible account of the “fusion of authenticity and contrivance” in reality television (Stowell 2024) and the narrativizing and gamifying of its starts (Cunningham 2024). As such, this oral history both…

  • A Little Privacy Please

    A Little Privacy Please

    My kids cannot understand what I’m sure they would consider my obsession with privacy. They technically didn’t grow up with cell phone, and got their first in middle school. Still, they’ve spent most of their lives with these devices, and the cultural changes created by these, and they insist upon the death of privacy. I…