A Cynical Election Ploy Like Hawley and Cruz’s Looks Harmless. Until It Isn’t with Elizabeth Saunders

Washington generally shrugs at cynical theatrical gestures like the GOP Senate effort, led by Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.), to object to the election results. Politicians see them as useful and harmless. Consider the regular news releases from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) making National Science Foundation projects sound ridiculous, or the House of Representatives’ decision in 2003 to have its cafeteria call french fries “freedom fries.” Wednesday’s episode in the Senate at first had the appearance of a dinner theater murder mystery in which the key suspects (Democratic operatives; sinister manufacturers of voting machines; the late Hugo Chávez) had been fingered by pro-Trump lawyers.

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Essay

Facebook and Falsehood

After the election, many people blamed Facebook for spreading partisan — and largely pro-Trump — “fake news,” like Pope Francis’s endorsement of Trump, or Hillary Clinton’s secret life-threatening illness. The company was assailed for prioritizing user “engagement,” meaning that its algorithms probably favored juicy fake news over other kinds of stories. Those algorithms had taken ...
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Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Negotiating Privacy across Arenas – The EU-US ‘Safe Harbor’ Discussions,” in Common Goods: Reinventing European and International Governance – ed. Adrienne Hèritier

Much recent theoretical attention has been devoted to the provision of common goods across arenas. The normal problems of common good provision (Olson 1968; Hardin 1982) are exacerbated when these problems spill across arenas (there are usually no actors capable of imposing hierarchical solutions), but there are also new difficulties. Solutions in one particular arena ...
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