Tara McMullin

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

SAM COLE: Honestly the best way I know how to do this is talking to my friends. Everyone is experiencing a different internet these days. Algorithms have got us sorted and siloed away from each other, so one person is seeing memes and “discourse” and... See more

Ultimately, Agreements are a collective wish we make about how we might be in the same space together. That space could be a classroom, a sports team, a club, a conference, committees or boards, an organizing group. They reflect what we need to participate while feeling joyful, trusted, and brave.

But they also can be flimsy as hell.

What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the... See more

I know what kind of work it takes to complete a book manuscript, and I want to do that work, but to arrive at the end of it and learn that what I should have been doing instead is flooding the zone on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok? That is fundamentally demoralizing.

Untangling the question of what I want to make from what will sell feels like crawling out of a very deep well.

Inherent in the concept of moral contagion, then, is the idea that moral-emotion expressions are among the most powerful signals to the self and others about one’s identity. As such, they may be among the most functionally relevant forms of expressions in the context of moral and political discourse online, where moral and political identities are... See more