Public Writing
Featured Essays:
Essay Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions
In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto. Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.” Read the full article in Bloomberg ...
Read Article
Academic ArticleEssay Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized – with Abraham Newman
Russian sanctions highlight how network analysis is urgently needed to find and protect vulnerable parts of the global economy. When Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, nobody expected that the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other nations would isolate Russia from the global economy in retaliation. Instead of limited and largely symbolic sanctions, which were all Russia faced when it annexed Crimea and occupied eastern parts of Ukraine in 2014, this latest response has had devastating ripple effects. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2022), “Weak Links in Finance and Supply Chains are Easily Weaponized, Nature 605, 219-222, May 12, ...
Read Article
Essay The U.S. Is the Only Sanctions Superpower. It Must Use That Power Wisely. – with Abraham Newman
For years, many believed that a world of global economic networks and interdependence — countries intimately connected via supply chains and finances — made war obsolete. That is part of the reason Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was so shocking. But the international economy itself has turned into a battlefield. The conventional war in Ukraine has unleashed a swift and staggering economic conflict, led by the United States and its allies against Russia. And that war is being waged with new weapons, forged in the post-Cold War age of global networks. As much as we talk about multipolar politics, when it comes to global networks, there ...
Read Article
Public Writing Archives
Featured Interviews:
Interview “Panopticons and Chokepoints,” an interview with Richard Byrne
A new view of international relations puts global networks – and how they can be weaponized – at its center. What’s the future of regulation in this new landscape? “The debate we see at the moment is never going to be about trade and open markets in the same kind of way anymore,” says Farrell. ...
Read Article
Interview Interview with economist Tyler Cowen on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas
Whether it’s China’s influence over the NBA, the US ban of Huawei, or the EU courts asserting that countries can force Facebook to take down content globally, Henry Farrell has played a key role articulating how global economic networks can enable state coercion. Tyler and Henry discuss these issues and more, including what a big ...
Read Article
Interviews
Sorry, we couldn't find any posts. Please try a different search.
Essays
“The “Intellectual Dark Web,” Explained: What Jordan Peterson Has in Common with the Alt-Right”
Bari Weiss, an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times, created a stir this week with a long article on a group that ...
Read More
Mark Zuckerberg Runs a Nation-State, and He’s The King with Margaret Levi and Tim O’Reilly
“In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said. He elaborated on this ...
Read More
Northern Ireland’s Brexit Problem
Next month, the Irish and British people should be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement serves as the cornerstone of ...
Read More
Our Hackable Political Future The New York Times with Rick Perlstein
Imagine it is the spring of 2019. A bottom-feeding website, perhaps tied to Russia, “surfaces” video of a sex scene starring an 18-year-old Kirsten Gillibrand. ...
Read More
American Democracy is an Easy Target
Americans have become paranoid about foreign cyberattacks on their political system, but they have nobody but themselves to blame. Access the full article here.
Read More
Saving Democratic Institutions from Corrupting Markets
Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles’ essay – and the book that lies behind it – are part of a broader liberaltarian challenge. Liberaltarianism, as I ...
Read More
How Facebook Stymies Social Science
What exactly was the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election campaign? How widespread was its infiltration of social media? And how much influence ...
Read More
This Year’s Economics Nobel winner Invented a Tool That’s Both Brilliant and Undemocratic
Richard Thaler, of the University of Chicago, just won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics for his contribution to behavioral economics — the subfield known ...
Read More
Revolutionary Possibility (on China Mieville’s October)
October, China Miéville’s new book, describes the October Revolution as a moment of possibility. In its closing pages, Miéville explains why he wrote the book, ...
Read More
Brexit and the Northern Irish Border
A new fight has been brewing over the consequences of Brexit for the border between Northern Ireland and the neighboring Republic of Ireland. Both British ...
Read More
When Politics Drives Scholarship – with Steve Teles
The publication of Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, a history of the “public choice” economist James Buchanan and his impact on American politics, has led ...
Read More
Even the Intellectual Left is Drawn to Conspiracy Theories about the Right. Resist Them with Steven Teles
It’s always hard in politics for people to take their opponents’ views seriously, but it’s become ever harder in Trump’s America. People are more engaged ...
Read More
Trump’s No Hypocrite: And That’s Bad News for the International Order – with Martha Finnemore
U.S. President Donald Trump can be accused of having many faults, but hypocrisy is not one of them. To be sure, Trump is wildly inconsistent. ...
Read More
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 ...
Read More
Disunited Kingdom
Britain’s political system is in crisis after Brexit. Shortly after voters decided that Britain should leave the European Union, David Cameron, the prime minister and ...
Read More