by Ken MacVey

Since 1914, the Federal Trade Commission ‘s mission has been to enforce civil antitrust and unfair competition/consumer protection laws. The question is whether this mission has been supplanted—whether the FTC under Trump 2 .0 is becoming the Federal Political Truth Commission.

My Background: The FTC Investigates the Movie and Record Industries

Many years ago I started my legal career as a lawyer for the FTC. In that role, I proposed investigations into the motion picture...

by Brooks Riley

RIP Pocket (aka Read It Later) 2007-July 8, 2025

The recent announcement of Mozilla’s shutdown of the Pocket app caught me by surprise. It felt as if the rug was being pulled out from under me—the rug being a motley weave of all the online articles and stories I’ve ever wanted to read later but never did. What would happen to all those pieces saved on impulse for a rainy day?

For those who don’t use it or even know of it, Pocket was a bookmarking service for links...

by Priya Malhotra

Virtue wasn’t always gentle.

In ancient Rome, virtus was a word of force and visibility. It came from the Latin word vir, meaning “man,” and encompassed ideals of military bravery, civic leadership, and public excellence. A virtuous man was someone who acted decisively in the public sphere—whether in war, politics, or the courts. Virtus was not about goodness in the moral sense. It was about fulfilling one’s public role with courage and...

by David Greer

Standing face to face with an Anna’s hummingbird hovering a foot or two from my nose, I felt a little mesmerized. Anna’s hummingbirds tend to have that effect on me. They’re otherworldly creatures, with a world of mystery packed into a body that weighs not much more than a paperclip. Hummingbirds are the only bird capable of both hovering and flying backwards, thanks in large part to a unique wingbeat pattern that has inspired...

by Nils Peterson

Freedom, high-day!
High-day, freedom!
Freedom, high-day, freedom!

1. One summer, roughly forty years ago, I set off to a Florida seaside town to participate in a three-week summer stock version of The Tempest. It was designed for academics who had something to do with Shakespeare or something to do with drama. So, accepted into the program were set designers, costume makers, stage managers, and teachers. I had been teaching Shakespeare, by a quirk of good fortune for 20...

Paul Grimstad at The Current:

In a 1989 interview with the Detroit Free Press, director Charlotte Zwerin worried that her documentary Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser, then newly out in general release after premiering the year before, would be labeled a “jazz film.” Zwerin had grown up, in the 1930s and ’40s, in Detroit, where she had heard a lot of jazz and become a lifelong fan of the music, yet she wanted audiences to see simply that Monk was “an American composer of...

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Adele Gleason in Lapham’s Quarterly:

1910: Lahore

As I knew him in the many summers he lived on estates joining ours in Elmira, N.Y., U.S.A., his wife’s birth place; the wonder of Mark Twain’s real personality increased. He reminded one of one of the many definitions of genius, a constant capacity for growth. The reproach of age is that it is “stale, flat and unprofitable.” Mr. Clemens’ age was always youthful, not in the way of amusement or of seeking amusement, for he...

Mehr Farooqi in The Indian Express:

Last night, a friend called to give me the sad news of Naim sahib’s passing. He had not been too well since suffering a stroke a couple of years ago but after returning from rehab his spirit was as indomitable as ever. He relished writing and wrote with zest; sparkling essays, columns and a weekly, later monthly, newsletter that he dispatched electronically to a large following. Naim sahib did not shy away from technology. He had a website on which he...

Matthew Sims at Aeon Magazine:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people took up baking, others decided to get a dog; I chose to grow and observe slime mould. The study in my partner’s flat in Edinburgh became home to two cultures of Physarum polycephalum, an acellular slime mould sometimes more casually referred to as ‘the blob’.

I began a series of experiments investigating how long it would take for two separated cell masses from the same bisected Physarum cell to stop fusing...