Alex Dobrenko

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless,... See more

It seems to me that Don believed deep down that our worlds were worth decorating, and that doing so was a joyful act. “The people who use lawn ornaments are typically friendly because they’re decorating the outside of their house for someone else,” he once told an interviewer.

A pandemic beacon of hope

The coolest things I discovered didn’t really come from doing research but rather from giving up researching and embracing connecting. Whether that means directly connecting with locals or connecting with once surroundings in a more metaphysical sense – like the kind of connecting that William Butler Yeats hints at when he says that “the world is... See more

That's the thing with the internet. It is not a singular place: the internet is made up by many internets. Some are connected, and some are not. This makes it hard to talk about the internet because your internet is unlikely to be similar to mine. Even when we visit the same social site, we experience different worlds. Where D sees a subcategory of... See more

The Democratic Party of George McGovern was, in this narrative, the party of “acid, amnesty and abortion,” the party of chaos, disruption and overreach. Out of touch with the vast American middle, it had cast its lot with cultural elites and antiwar militants. This Democratic Party, said the Nixon campaign, could not relate to the tens of millions... See more