The point, after all, is to change the world.
As the presidential primaries reach a fever pitch, the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders lay bare the limits of liberalism’s postwar consensus, and demand a reimagined agenda for progressive politics in the twenty-first century.
Because the history of Silicon Valley is so recent and its social implications so broad, social scientists have been slow to establish its empirical significance as an object for inquiry. We pry open, for critical analysis, the Pandora’s box of social forces contained in our smartphones, apps, and tablets.
Two years after the Big Data hype of 2012, the midterm elections are exposing the flaws of Nate Silver’s statistical approach to politics: Journalism should work to make the world more comprehensible, not more predictable.