All posts tagged: editorial board

There Are 14 Billion Videos on YouTube

There Are 14 Billion Videos on YouTube

Until last month, nobody outside of YouTube had a solid estimate for just how many videos are on the site. Eight hundred million? One billion? It turns out that the figure is more like 14 billion—more than one and a half videos for every person on the planet—and that’s counting strictly those that are publicly visible. I have that number not because YouTube maintains a public counter and not because the company issued a press release announcing it. I’m able to share it with you now only because I’m part of a small team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who spent a year figuring out how to calculate it. Our team’s paper, which was published last month, provides what we believe is the most comprehensive analysis of the world’s most important video-sharing platform to date. The viral videos and popular conspiracy theorists are, of course, important. But the reality is that the number and perhaps even importance of those videos is dwarfed by hours-long church services, condo-board meetings, and other miscellaneous …

The Marriage Plot – The Atlantic

The Marriage Plot – The Atlantic

Serious relationships are full of practical concerns. I’ve known loving couples who were unable to tie the knot despite their affection for each other, because of disagreements about whether to have children or about religious conversion, or because of divergent professional aspirations. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you might like them to, and it’s no one’s fault. There are also many loving couples who get married despite significant differences. The Washington Post editorial board is concerned that this isn’t happening enough. One reason they are concerned is that there is a growing political gender divide, particularly among young Americans, with young men becoming more conservative and young women shifting left. Fearing a “collapse of American marriage,” the Post recently editorialized that a “cultural shift might be necessary—one that views politics as a part of people’s identity but far from the most important part. Americans’ ability to live together, quite literally, might depend on it.” I’m sympathetic to the idea that people should try their best to accommodate someone for whom they have …

The American Socialist Split Over Israel

The American Socialist Split Over Israel

Nearly five decades ago, the organization that would become the Democratic Socialists of America united around core principles, including universal health care, workers’ rights, and support for the social-democratic state of Israel. That group included such left-liberal luminaries as California Congressman Ron Dellums, the intellectuals Irving Howe and Cornel West, and future New York Mayor David Dinkins. The writer and activist Michael Harrington, whose Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee was a precursor to the DSA, declared in 1975: “I support Israel as an internationalist. Israel is a democratic country whose people are passionately defending its self-determination.” He added that to “preposterously charge” that Zionism is racism—as the United Nations General Assembly asserted in a resolution that year—“is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning.” For Harrington and his comrades to speak that way in today’s unsubtle times would be inconceivable. DSA leaders, their organization swollen to 75,000 members, now describe Israel as an apartheid colonialist state. When, on October 7, Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups slaughtered 1,200 men, women, children, and infants, …

Cancel Culture Cuts Both Ways

Cancel Culture Cuts Both Ways

On October 13, The Onion shared on X (formerly Twitter) the headline for a new satirical article: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas.” The tweet was liked by nearly 100,000 people. Within a couple of hours, Michael Eisen, a genetics professor at UC Berkeley and the editor of eLife, an influential open-access journal for the life sciences, retweeted the post with the comment that The Onion “speaks with more courage, insight and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together.” As Eisen told me in a recent phone interview, he did this “on Friday the 13th—I should have known that was a bad idea.” At first, reactions to Eisen’s tweet were muted. On X, a scientist asked Eisen, who is Jewish and has relatives in Israel, whether he condemned Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack; in response to another post, Eisen wrote, “I condemn Hamas. I condemn the way Israel has treated Palestinians. I condemn the way one abhorrent act is used to justify another.” But then the …