Joan Westenberg, Freelance Journalist Profile

Articles

"AI Will Create Plenty of Jobs"

1 week ago | flipboard.com | Joan Westenberg

9 hours agoFrancesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School, has been battling allegations of data fraud for years. Harvard University revoked the tenure of Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino after years of data fraud allegations, a university spokesperson confirmed. Gino, widely known for …
An America of Tanks and Taxes

3 weeks ago | theindex.media | Joan Westenberg

2 min The shadow of 25 Abrams tanks will soon fall across Washington's streets. Not for national emergency. Not for external threat. For a birthday party. Donald Trump's 79th, to be precise, conveniently aligned with the Army's 250th anniversary celebration. The Pentagon estimates the Putinesque spectacle will cost American taxpayers between $25 million and $45 million—excluding the inevitable road repairs that will follow 70-ton war machines grinding across D.C. asphalt.
Cynicism Is the Default Epistemology of People with Too Much Information and Too Little Power

1 month ago | flipboard.com | Joan Westenberg

7 hours agoOn the Horizon of Knowledge: The More We Learn, The Less We UnderstandKnowledge is like an iceberg — every answer uncovered subsequently reveals even more questions submerged beneath it. In the pursuit of understanding, …1 day agoCrossroads of consciousness: whose decolonization is it in Nigeria? The call for decolonial discourse has increasingly gained global purchase, yet its growing visibility often masks an unresolved question: who …2 days agoIs Trump a Cult Leader?
Rebuke.

1 month ago | theindex.media | Joan Westenberg

3 min They thought they could export the chaos. They thought nationalism was a currency that could be traded across borders, that autocratic rhetoric could be franchised like a fast-food chain, and that the world would follow their script. But instead of ushering in a new global rightwing order, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the far-right coalition orbiting them have triggered something else entirely: a deliberate backlash against conservatism itself. Three elections.
America's Next Top Conman

1 month ago | theindex.media | Joan Westenberg

A system that can't distinguish between confidence and competence isn't broken, it's doing exactly what it was designed to: reward the loudest voice, not the best idea. Promote the person who looks like a leader, not the one who thinks like one. Elect the swagger, not the skill. And once that system hits scale—when it's amplified by algorithms, saturated through media, and reinforced by social proof—the outcome was inevitable. We didn't get Trump by accident.
Notes from the Exit: Why I Left the Attention Economy

1 month ago | joanwestenberg.com | Joan Westenberg

— 2 min read I didn’t leave the attention economy because I hated it. I left because I understood it, because once you see the system for what it is—a parasitic loop that rewards noise over nuance, metrics over meaning, reaction over reflection—you have two choices. Keep optimizing for reach, or start optimizing for resonance. At some point, every creator hits a wall - it’s not burnout exactly. It’s misalignment.
Why Hitler Slept Through D-Day

1 month ago | joanwestenberg.com | Joan Westenberg

On the morning of June 6th, 1944, Hitler was sound asleep. The Allies were landing. Tens of thousands of soldiers were pouring onto the beaches. The tide was turning, the war accelerating toward its violent, inevitable end. And the man leading the Reich was in bed, untouched. His generals knew the crisis was unfolding. His inner circle knew. Everyone knew. But no one would wake him. Because by that point, Hitler wasn’t running a government.
The Cost of Permanent Crisis

1 month ago | theindex.media | Joan Westenberg

We've built a civilization addicted to adrenaline. The hits come hourly. New tariffs. Another strike. A missile. A fire. A viral outrage. A celebrity scandal. A political meltdown. From the Wall Street Journal to the Times, the same formula loops endlessly: BREAKING. UPDATE. LIVE. PANIC. We're getting further away from news and closer than ever to engineered volatility. Our systems now depend on it. Media profits from crisis clicks. Politicians campaign on crisis narratives.
Trust Is Dead. Trump Keeps Selling the Corpse.

2 months ago | flipboard.com | Joan Westenberg

9 hours agoBoy, Oh Boycott: Can Canada’s ‘Buy Canadian’ Movement Actually Dent the US? America’s once friendly northern neighbor is up in arms.Sports fans have drowned out the American national anthem in jet engine-volume jeers.
Authoritarian Grift Meets the Grind of Justice

2 months ago | theindex.media | Joan Westenberg

Marine Le Pen thought she was untouchable. Wrapped in tricolor nationalism, elevated by decades of scapegoating, she built a brand out of grievance and paranoia. She claimed the people's voice, even as she siphoned public money behind their backs. She stoked fires she had no intention of putting out, pointed fingers at enemies she invented wholesale, and assumed, like every strongman with a PR team, that the system she mocked would never bite back. Then it did. The French courts called her bluff.