If you’ve given much thought to the Federal Communications Commission in recent years, it probably had something to do with Brendan Carr. The group’s chairman since 2025, Carr has been on an ongoing, public rampage against freedom of speech: he’s gone after late-night hosts like Jimmy Kimmel, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses over Iran war … Read more
Christmas morning. Was it really Christmas morning? Oh, metaphorically speaking. I’m Canadian, very gullible. Now you know. Good to know. It was a total joy, because I’ve been swimming in these QAnon, 4chan, right-wing waters for a long time. I think when it was quite new and scary in 2016, 2015, when you had Pepe … Read more
In 1996, the Tibetan Freedom Concert turned an underreported human rights struggle into a global cultural moment. The brainchild of Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch, the San Francisco benefit featured an enviable lineup of rock and hip-hop heavies, including Rage Against the Machine, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Björk, A Tribe Called Quest, Foo Fighters, … Read more
Brian Barrett: Noah, you are a celebrated, venerated national security journalist. You are. You have covered national security for a long time and you have covered, for lack of a better word, real spy stuff. You’ve been deep in it. How does that compare to this in terms of source handling in terms of the … Read more
For the past year, Spotify has been quietly purging tens of thousands of podcasts that advertised illegal online pharmacies. A report released Thursday by Senator Maggie Hassan, ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, faults the company for acting only after news outlets exposed the content and her office spent nearly a year pressing for … Read more
Five years ago, I published a report in these pages titled “The Devil You Know.” It examined the wrongful convictions of two young men for the rape and murder of Josette Wright, a 12-year-old girl in Carmel, New York. In the fall of 1995, hunters stumbled on Josette’s bones in the woods near rural Carmel, … Read more
Zoë Schiffer: Deviance and freaks, the new name of our podcast. And this is, I mean, just going back to red teaming, that’s work that a trust and safety team typically does. And those teams— Leah Feiger: We don’t have those anymore. Zoë Schiffer: They’re not as big as they used to be. There’s just … Read more