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Lorraine Martin, a nurse in Greenwich, was arrested in 2010 with her two grown sons when police raided her home and found a small stash of marijuana, scales and plastic bags. The case against her was tossed out when she agreed to take some drug classes, and the official record was automatically purged. It was, the law seemed to assure her, as if it had never happened.

Defamation is the publication of information that is both damaging and false. The arrest story was obviously true when it was first published. But Connecticut’s erasure law has already established that truth can be fungible. Martin, her suit says, was “deemed never to have been arrested.” And therefore the news story had metamorphosed into a falsehood.

They debate the difference between “historical fact” and “legal fact.” They dispute whether something that was true when it happened can become not just private but actually untrue, so untrue you can swear an oath that it never happened and, in the eyes of the law, you’ll be telling the truth.

Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign issued a press release that, amid an increasingly Islamophobic climate in the US and abroad, called for a blanket ban on any Muslim immigration—a position so starkly bigoted that the two-paragraph statement went viral on Twitter in a matter of moments. (Some users even questioned whether it was real, but it's as real as everything in this universe.)

"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the release begins, leaving it unclear what exactly Trump thinks could possibly be "going on." An infiltration of the country by ISIS that the candidate has alluded to? A hostile population of American-born Muslims?

Trump goes on to discuss the "hatred" Muslims apparently have for Americans, or America, or something. "Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump says in the statement. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." How the government could "determine" the source of this alleged hatred isn't explained, nor does Trump address how he or anyone else might put a stop to it.

With a few exceptions, namely Mr. Trump’s views on immigration, Americans have little recall of reading, hearing or seeing information about the policies of the presidential candidates or their positions on issues. Our research shows instead that in the case of Mr. Trump, Americans monitor his statements, his accusations, his travel and his events, and in the case of Mrs. Clinton they report mainly hearing about her past behavior, her character and, most recently, her health.

The continuing research, conducted by Gallup in conjunction with University of Michigan and Georgetown, found that since early July more than seven in 10 Americans read, saw or heard something about at least one of the presidential candidates in the days before the daily interviews. On some days that number rises to over 80 percent and has never, even on weekends, fallen below 60 percen

Since July we have asked more than 30,000 Americans to say exactly what it was they read, saw or heard about the two major party candidates over the past several days. The type of information getting through to Americans varies significantly depending on whether the candidate in question is Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton

Gamergate

The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect

ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.

The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.

Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.

I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century

Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victimhood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”

But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.

Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.

The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.”

Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”

As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!”

Beauty is what you experience when you look at a flower or a lovely face. It is contained, pleasurable, intimate and romantic. Sublime is what you feel when you look at a mountain range or a tornado. It involves awe, veneration, maybe even a touch of fear

neuroscientists have shown that the experiences of beauty and awe activate different parts of the brain.

I’d say that in America today some of the little loves are fraying, and big love is almost a foreign language. Almost nobody speaks about the American project in the same ardent tones that were once routine.

In addition to a list of people’s most-used words and other straightforward stats like follower counts, ThinkUp shows subscribers more unusual information such as how often they thank and congratulate people, how frequently they swear, whose voices they tend to amplify and which posts get the biggest reaction and from whom.

after using ThinkUp for about six months, I’ve found it to be an indispensable guide to how I navigate social networks.

Every morning the service delivers an email packed with information, and in its weighty thoroughness, it reminds you that what you do on Twitter and Facebook can change your life, and other people’s lives, in important, sometimes unforeseen ways.

Four out of five teenagers turn to the Internet for health information, but they don’t always put much stock in what they find

The source they really trust with questions about health? Surprise: their parents.

One in three teenagers said they changed their behavior because of what they had learned from online sites or apps. “It shows that teenagers can be independent and empowered actors in taking care of their own health,” said Vicky Rideout, a media and health researcher who designed the survey.

Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails

Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:

"At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."

Coursekit is a new tool that lets teachers and educators create mini social networks around individual courses and lectures.

The goal of the service, said Joseph Cohen, its co-founder and chief executive, is to take some of the most successful elements of social networking — especially the fluid exchange of ideas that comes natural to online interactions — to revitalize the education experience. Students are already accustomed to interacting online and supplementing their daily lives with the Web and social media. Why should that stop when it comes to learning? “Our education experience is truly offline,” he said. “We want to build what Facebook has done for your personal life, but for your school.”

Using Coursekit’s software, teachers can upload homework assignments, answer questions, grade work and facilitate discussions with their students. In addition, students can use the software to chat with one another, collaborate on projects and share relevant materials with their classmates

On the surface, the dispute is about grout and tiles, but it is also a collision of values and taste. Ms. Breen said she suspected that one of the founders of RFR was just not a fan of “Le Tricorne” — a person who heard him discussing the work said he dismissed it as “a schmatte,” Yiddish for rag — and was using the damaged-wall argument as a pretense to ditch it for good.

His own tastes run to contemporary artists, like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and he has told people that he wants to showcase highlights of his vast trove in the space now occupied by “Le Tricorne.”Neither Mr. Rosen nor anyone contacted at RFR returned calls for comment.

“Le Tricorne” is not regarded as one of Picasso’s masterpieces, partly because it strays from the avant-garde path he had started traveling a decade earlier with Cubism. Its sheer size reduces its market value, as does its origins as a stage prop. In 2008, when the conservancy wanted an estimated value for insurance purposes, Christie’s appraised the work at $1.6 million.

Amazon is a global superstore, like Walmart. It’s also a hardware manufacturer, like Apple, and a utility, like Con Edison, and a video distributor, like Netflix, and a book publisher, like Random House, and a production studio, like Paramount, and a literary magazine, like The Paris Review, and a grocery deliverer, like FreshDirect, and someday it might be a package service, like U.P.S. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, also owns a major newspaper, the Washington Post. All these streams and tributaries make Amazon something radically new in the history of American business

Amazon is not just the “Everything Store,” to quote the title of Brad Stone’s rich chronicle of Bezos and his company; it’s more like the Everything. What remains constant is ambition, and the search for new things to be ambitious about.

It wasn’t a love of books that led him to start an online bookstore. “It was totally based on the property of books as a product,” Shel Kaphan, Bezos’s former deputy, says. Books are easy to ship and hard to break, and there was a major distribution warehouse in Oregon. Crucially, there are far too many books, in and out of print, to sell even a fraction of them at a physical store. The vast selection made possible by the Internet gave Amazon its initial advantage, and a wedge into selling everything else.

Stallman, a computing veteran who is a strong advocate of free software via his Free Software Foundation, warned that making extensive use of cloud computing was "worse than stupidity" because it meant a loss of control of data.

The risks include loss of legal rights to data if it is stored on a company's machine's rather than your own, Stallman points out: "In the US, you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant."

"I think that marketers like "cloud computing" because it is devoid of substantive meaning. The term's meaning is not substance, it's an attitude: 'Let any Tom, Dick and Harry hold your data, let any Tom, Dick and Harry do your computing for you (and control it).' Perhaps the term 'careless computing' would suit it better."

Every American sees that leaders in foreign countries sometimes behave immorally. Yet we often seem averse to believing that our own leaders can be just as malign.

That's certainly my bias: Judging the character of U.S. officials, my gut impulse is to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But I know that my gut is sometimes wrong, that our institutions rather than anything intrinsic to our compatriots explains the comparative lack of corruption and tyranny in the United States, and that it's important to stay open to the possibility of malign or corrupt leaders—because otherwise, it's impossible to adequately guard against them. The Founders understood this. So did generations of traditional conservatives.

Why do people believe in God? What is our evidence that there is an invisible agent who has a real impact on our lives? How can those people be so confident?

These are the questions that university-educated liberals ask about faith. They are deep questions. But they are also abstract and intellectual. They are philosophical questions. In an evangelical church, the questions would probably have circled around how to feel God’s love and how to be more aware of God’s presence. Those are fundamentally practical questions.

The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense of this experience of being part of something greater. Durkheim thought that belief was more like a flag than a philosophical position: You don’t go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church.

The Daily Currant is a fake-news site of a different stripe: one entirely devoid of jokes. Whether this humorlessness is intentional or not—the site's founder contends his critics don't have a sense of subtlety—the site's business model as an ad-driven clickbait-generator relies on it. When Currant stories go viral, it's not because their satire contains essential truths, but rather because their satire is taken as truth—and usually that "truth" is engineered to outrage a particular frequency of the political spectrum. As Slate's Josh Voorhees wrote after Drudge fell for the Bloomberg story, "It's a classic Currant con, one that relies on its mark wanting to believe a particular story is true." 

The Daily Currant's headlines don’t engage in subtlety so much as fail entirely to signal humorous intention. That would be acceptable, perhaps even clever, if the stories themselves skillfully exploited the reader's initial credulity, the copy growing increasingly ludicrous until the reader realizes the joke. Instead, jokes sometimes materialize in the final lines, but they’re half-baked at best. The VA story ends with Obama dismissing calls for officials to resign. "Why," Obama asks, "would holding people accountable for their actions be necessary?” That neither funny nor satirical. But it rings true to partisans who genuinely believe that Obama thinks that way—the same people who, in a flash of outrage, are most likely to share the story on social media.

as he approached 40, Fabrice Grinda, a French technology entrepreneur with an estimated net worth of $100 million, couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Somehow the trappings of his success were weighing him down.

“People turn 40 and usually buy a shiny sports car,” Mr. Grinda said during an interview in a penthouse suite at Sixty LES, a downtown boutique hotel. “They don’t say, ‘I’m downsizing my life and giving up all my possessions to focus on experiences and friendships.’

He dubbed it “the very big downgrade”: He was going to travel the world, working on the fly while staying with friends and family. He was purposely arranging things so that he would have a chance to focus on what was meaningful in life.

Anatta is not a unified, unchanging self. It is more like a concert, constantly changing emotions, perceptions, and thoughts. Our minds are fragmented and impermanent. A change occurred in the band, so it follows that one expects a change in the music. Both Buddhism and neuroscience converge on a similar point of view: The way it feels isn’t how it is. There is no permanent, constant soul in the background. Even our language about ourselves is to be distrusted (requiring the tortured negation of anatta). In the broadest strokes then, neuroscience and Buddhism agree.

How did Buddhism get so much right? I speak here as an outsider, but it seems to me that Buddhism started with a bit of empiricism. Perhaps the founders of Buddhism were pre-scientific, but they did use empirical data. They noted the natural world: the sun sets, the wind blows into a field, one insect eats another. There is constant change, shifting parts, and impermanence. They called this impermanence anicca, and it forms a central dogma of Buddhism.