China is neither a Marxist fundamentalist regime nor a universally-surveilled open-air prison, in which one is free to do nothing but worship the party and carry out its edicts. That is however the impression created by quite a bit of the media. I think that’s not the fault of individual journalists, instead more structural explanations are at work. News bureaus are highly concentrated in Beijing, due in part to natural corporate consolidation, but mostly because the government maintains a strict cap on foreign journalist visas. As a result, the bulk of journalists are based in the part of China that has the most politics and the least sense of growth. Everything here is doom and gloom, a fact well conveyed to the outside world.

How New York Times is clawing its way into the future:

The main goal is... to transform the Times’ digital subscriptions into the main engine of a billion-dollar business, one that could pay to put reporters on the ground in 174 countries even if (OK, when) the printing presses stop forever. To hit that mark, the Times is embarking on an ambitious plan inspired by the strategies of Netflix, Spotify, and HBO: invest heavily in a core offering... while continuously adding new online services and features... so that a subscription becomes indispensable to the lives of its existing subscribers and more attractive to future ones.

I am gay. I am Mormon. I am married to a woman. I am happy every single day. My life is filled with joy. I have a wonderful sex life. And I’ve been married for ten years, and plan to be married for decades more to come to the woman of my dreams.

A doctor loses the woman of his dreams and hires a broke friend to help get her back. The plan is to prank her new boyfriend. Today, they’re in jail for murder.

I was asked about labor protections for adult-film performers. I said: You have to recognize how complicated this is. The things that sex workers do to stay safe are almost always the things civilians want to pass laws to stop. Everything looks different depending on the distance from which you’re looking.

A talk from the re:publica conference in Berlin:

The good part about naming a talk in 2017 ‘Notes from an Emergency’ is that there are so many directions to take it. The emergency I want to talk about is the rise of a vigorous ethnic nationalism in Europe and America. This nationalism makes skillful use of online tools, tools that we believed inherently promoted freedom, to advance an authoritarian agenda.

How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.

What does satire do? What should we expect of it? Is it crucial to Western culture that we be free to produce it?

The U.S. is one of only two countries that don’t guarantee paid maternity leave. As a result, women across the country are rushing back to work after C-sections and losing their positions in order to take care of newborns.

Alabama’s chemical-endangerment law was passed to protect kids from meth labs. But is the prosecution of about 60 mothers – and the definition of “child” extended to “unborn child” – pushing its boundaries too far?

A young reporter heads to Colombia to report on the conflict between FARC and the paramilitaries. He meets a girl on the bus. After they begin a relationship, she reveals that that she is part of a death squad.

Joe Howlett gave his life to save an animal that may already be past the point of no return. After ten centuries of annihilation, is there any way to undo the damage done?

Last fall, when the deadliest blaze in America in a century blew through Northern California, thousands of people—including those in the tiny community of Helltown—were forced to flee. This is the story of four friends who stayed to fight.

We aspire to a life without discomfort, without unpleasantness. But what kind of life would that be? It is as hard to imagine a world without pain as a person without sadness: a whole dimension of existence would be missing.

The internet is changing everything we thought we knew about the value of stuff—from stocks, to flying cherub art, to cats with Pop-Tart bodies.

For centuries, everyone from archaeologists to amateurs pillaged artifacts — and human remains. Now, the FBI is cracking down on those who continue to dig.

A profile of Joe Paterno.

Mormonism’s past and present.

Surfing San Francisco with a true believer.

The many lives of imposter Frédéric Bourdin.

Wanders through the emptied post-American landscape.