Sean Illing

6 days ago | vox.com | Sean Illing

For more than half a century, the American right has preached the virtues of free markets and low taxes and deregulation. But a new wave of conservative thinkers are now arguing that Republicans have been wrong — or at the very least misguided — about the economy. This new economic thinking represents a break from what we’ve come to expect from the American right.

4 weeks ago | vox.com | Sean Illing

There are very few philosophers who become part of popular culture, and often, if their ideas become influential, people don’t know where they came from. Niccolò Machiavelli, the great 16th-century diplomat and writer, is an exception. I don’t know how many people have actually read Machiavelli, but almost everyone knows the name, and almost everyone thinks they know what the word “Machiavellian” means. It’s someone who’s cunning and shrewd and manipulative.

1 month ago | vox.com | Sean Illing

You often hear about “ideology” these days. Even if that word isn’t mentioned, it’s very much what’s being discussed. When President Donald Trump denounces the left, he’s talking about gender ideology or critical race theory or DEI. When the left denounces Trump, they talk about fascism. Wherever you look, ideology is being used to explain or dismiss or justify policies. Buried in much of this discourse is an unstated assumption that the real ideologues are on the other side.

1 month ago | vox.com | Sean Illing

There are lots of stories to tell about the Covid pandemic, but most of them, if you drill down, are about politics. It’s about who made the decisions, who set the priorities, who mattered, who suffered the most, and why? Frances Lee is a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and the co-author of a new book called In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. It’s a careful book that treats our response to Covid as a kind of stress test for our political system.

2 months ago | vox.com | Sean Illing

It’s hard to know what to think about AI. It’s easy to imagine a future in which chatbots and research assistants make almost everything we do faster and smarter. It’s equally easy to imagine a world in which those same tools take our jobs and upend society. Which is why, depending on who you ask, AI is either going to save the world or destroy it. What are we to make of that uncertainty? Jaron Lanier is a digital philosopher and the author of several bestselling books on technology.