Can journalists measure how much good we’re doing? What if we learn something we don’t want to know? Sorry to be that guy. But for the sake of illustration: There’s a scene in 2011’s “Moneyball” (if you’ve seen the movie, just skip ahead) where Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt, brings America’s…

Humanity’s existential confrontation with machines is not going as expected. I’m reading Czesław Miłosz’s “The Captive Mind,” a dissident memoir of the absurdities of Poland under Stalinist rule, and there’s this haunting passage about the mind’s misperception of permanence: “Man tends to regard the order he lives in as natural. The houses he passes on…

An interview with host Lizzie O’Leary on Slate’s “What Next: TBD” podcast. Happy Sunday, everyone! Earlier this week, I talked to Lizzie O’Leary for Slate’s “What Next: TBD” podcast about what’s been going wrong with how we pay for journalism and what Big Tech has to do with it. You can catch the show on…