The Curious Engineer

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Ethan Zuckerman

ethanzuckerman.com

Ethan Zuckerman’s online home, since 2003

Society / politics / economyTech news / industryEssays / personal

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
3,039 from 9 Nov 2003 to 26 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (9 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://ethanzuckerman.com/feed/

Latest

October 2026

  1. Public Media vs. P(dystopia): reflections from Attention 2026

August 2026

  1. My personal contribution to the US/Canada trade war
  2. The Eyes Have Had It: A (Mental) Health Update from the Summer of Sue

March 2026

  1. Recent Writing, as of March 2026
  2. Howard French: The Second Emancipation

January 2026

  1. “Where Should We Live” – a new class on cities, migration and climate change
  2. Listening to All the Music

December 2025

  1. Gramsci’s Nightmare: AI, Platform Power and the Automation of Cultural Hegemony

November 2025

  1. How do we communicate about climate without shaming audiences?

October 2025

  1. Govern or Be Governed: Gary Marcus on Shorting Neural Networks
  2. Cory Doctorow on the weird upside of the Trump presidency
  3. Govern or Be Governed: Donald Trump Will Seek an Unconstitutional Third Term
  4. Govern or Be Governed: Chatbots as the new threat to Children Online
  5. Govern or Be Governed: What are the Threats to Freedom of Speech?
  6. Govern or Be Governed: Protecting Creativity is Protecting Democracy
  7. Frank McCourt on the value of personal data at Govern or be Governed
  8. Govern or Be Governed: Can Anyone Regulate Big Tech?
  9. Tracking ICE with Media Cloud data
  10. amac at UMass: How do we regulate AI?

July 2025

  1. #KeepGVStrong: Global Voices advocates for a connected world at a dark time
  2. Road trip roundup… preparing for Great Lakes 2025
  3. Stalking the Statistically Improbable Restaurant… With Data!

April 2025

  1. AIxDemocracy: What are the politics of AI?
  2. Science on Screen: Don’t Look Up

March 2025

  1. “Post-post-truth”, or how the SignalGate story is forking reality
  2. Jay Rosen and Taylor Owen: Can journalism survive Trump? Can democracy?
  3. Focus on the player, not the puck: Finnish approaches to combatting electoral interference
  4. Taylor Owen: Canadians now see the US as the most serious disinfo threat
  5. Freedom Interrupted: Electoral Interference
  6. He’s not a neoliberal, “He’s a thug” – Stiglitz on Trump, in Montreal

February 2025

  1. Liz Pelly at UMass: Spotify, the Mood Machine

January 2025

  1. From WEIRD to Wide: my keynote at CSCW 2024 in Costa Rica

December 2024

  1. Rising Voices: Listening to the world on its own terms – an update from the Global Voices summit in Nepal

October 2024

  1. Danielle Allen at UMass Amherst on “How to be a Confident Pluralist”
  2. What if our nation is not built for climate change?

August 2024

  1. Road trip: The Company Town and the Corn Fields
  2. Roadtrip: A tale of two cities
  3. Roadtrip: Utica Starts With You
  4. Road trip: Peoria to Kankakee
  5. Roadtrip: Decatur, from corn to soy to cricket city?
  6. Roadtrip: In search of the “statistically improbable restaurant”
  7. Roadtrip: Side quest in Northern Ohio
  8. Roadtrip: Buried, with dignity, in Elmira
  9. Roadtrip: A Square Deal in Binghamton
  10. By the numbers: what statistics can and can’t tell you about “undervalued” cities

July 2024

  1. Road trip! Driving by data set

May 2024

  1. A brief update on Zuckerman vs. Meta
  2. Zuckerman vs. Meta Platforms

April 2024

  1. Twitter’s New Business Model: Russian Disinfo

March 2024

  1. Pablo Boczkowski on the crisis in the “mental health capital of the world”

December 2023

  1. How Big is YouTube?
  2. Disinfo and Elections in the Global Majority

November 2023

  1. Kai-Cheng Yang: The Social Bots are Coming…

October 2023

  1. Heather Ford: Is the Web Eating Itself? LLMs versus verifiability

September 2023

  1. What I Did On My Summer Vacation: 2023

August 2023

  1. Lightning Talks at CU Boulder Local Tech Economies
  2. Local Tech Ecologies: Fernanda Rosa on decolonizing technology
  3. From Phoenix to Cleveland: why we live where we live and why it’s time to change

July 2023

  1. Competition for Twitter is good. Threads, thus far, is not.

March 2023

  1. Elon Musk’s Compelling Case for Worst Human of 2023

February 2023

  1. New writing!

January 2023

  1. Empagliflozin (Jardiance) and Type 1 diabetes – a patient’s perspective on SGLT inhibitors

October 2022

  1. Legacy Cities: an extended remix of my talk at PopTech 2022
  2. Our wedding, October 7-9, 2022
  3. Five years sober.

September 2022

  1. Governance, not Moderation: remarks at the Trust and Safety Research Conference
  2. The Monarchy, the Subaltern and the Public Sphere

August 2022

  1. Legacy cities and the changing nature of the good life

February 2022

  1. Danielle Allen ends her campaigns… or “How Institutions Insulate Themselves from Change”
  2. My pandemic coping strategy: interviewing.

October 2021

  1. Hope and Joy

August 2021

  1. Microfinance and public shaming in Nigeria
  2. I read Facebook’s Widely Viewed Content Report. It’s really strange.

July 2021

  1. Why Study Media Ecosystems?

June 2021

  1. Recommendations from the road

April 2021

  1. A milestone I never expected

February 2021

  1. The Year of Going Nowhere
  2. Hey Twitter, I need it not to be 6ourbon 7ime

January 2021

  1. Mistrust, or Books as Letters to a Future World
  2. Fixing disinformation won’t save us

November 2020

  1. The US, Canada and “long hope”
  2. Stop Doomscrolling. Hang out with smart folks trying to build better futures online.

October 2020

  1. Beyond Facebook Logic: Help us Identify and Map Alternative Social Media!

September 2020

  1. A personal update

August 2020

  1. To the future occupants of my office at the MIT Media Lab

June 2020

  1. #iftheygunnedmedown Six Years Later, and Just as Vital – an interview with activist C.J. Lawrence

April 2020

  1. Next steps

January 2020

  1. Digital Public Infrastructure… and a few words in defense of optimism

October 2019

  1. Whose deaths matter? New research on Black Lives Matter and media attention

August 2019

  1. On me, and the Media Lab
  2. Training the next generation of ethical techies
  3. Philanthropy and the hand-off – what happens if government can’t scale social experiments?

July 2019

  1. Beyond the Vast Wasteland: briefing Congresspeople for the Aspen Institute
  2. Thinking in Solid

June 2019

  1. Sir Tim versus Black Mirror

May 2019

  1. Rest in peace, Binyavanga Wainaina

January 2019

  1. Don’t use A. Briggs
  2. Deceptive ads and the DRC election: help us document possible election fraud
  3. Fake News and the DRC election? Please help us find these rogue ads

December 2018

  1. We Make the Media – a recent speech at Freedom of Speech Online 2018

June 2018

  1. Media and provenance

May 2018

  1. Six or Seven Things Social Media Can Do For Democracy
  2. Two Bens and a Mark: a talk at Ben Franklin Hall in Philadelphia

April 2018

  1. Because America’s Family Leave Policy Sucks, Too.

November 2017

  1. Who Filters Your News? Why we built gobo.social
  2. Finding hope… and dissing Lin-Manuel… at the Obama Foundation Summit

October 2017

  1. Stop killing protesters, including those protesting violence against protesters!

August 2017

  1. Mastodon is big in Japan. The reason why is… uncomfortable
  2. Mistrust, Efficacy and the New Civics – a whitepaper for the Knight Foundation
  3. The Village of Peace. And Coca. Lots of Coca.

July 2017

  1. Defining(?) Disobedience

February 2017

  1. Seeing Haiti: a photo essay

January 2017

  1. Stop saying “fake news”. It’s not helping.
  2. It’s Journalism’s Job to Save Civics
  3. Getting beyond “fake news”
  4. The Four Freedoms, in 2017

December 2016

  1. Race, Fame and Ability: untangling media coverage of NFL QBs
  2. Lunch with my friend, the Trump supporter

November 2016

  1. Trump’s victory and the rise of insurrectionism in America
  2. Making space for sadness
  3. What happens when mistrust wins – my speech at the Colombian national journalism prize
  4. This crazy election: Denial of Service attacks on Democracy

October 2016

  1. Dumpsterfire 2016: What To Do When You Have No Idea What To Do

September 2016

  1. Going Solo – On hating and accepting change
  2. Massive National Prison Strike! Maybe. We don’t know. That’s a problem.

August 2016

  1. Supporting Feyisa Lilesa, a remarkable athlete and protester
  2. When attention matters: Ethiopia crushes dissent in Oromia
  3. The village of peace… and of coca leaves

June 2016

  1. The worst thing I read this year, and what it taught me… or Can we design sociotechnical systems that don’t suck?

May 2016

  1. From disastrous decisions to decentralization: a mostly spontaneous talk for Data & Society
  2. Life, Only Moderately Messed Up, part 2: Getting Help
  3. Lessons from Letterlocking: a serendipitous academic encounter
  4. That’s _Professor_ Bozo to you, Pal

April 2016

  1. In loving memory of Patrick Fiachie

March 2016

  1. Rooftop solar, and the four levers of social change

February 2016

  1. Ben Franklin, the Post Office and the Digital Public Sphere
  2. T. Greg Doucette on false arrest and police brutality
  3. I never went looking for a mentor
  4. Fred Turner: The link from anti-fascist art and the “historical problem” of Facebook
  5. Why is Verizon letting rural broadband decay?
  6. Heroin and Hope

January 2016

  1. Update, or a missing person report

November 2015

  1. Urgent: Reports that Bassel Khartabil has been sentenced to death

October 2015

  1. Insurrectionist Civics in the Age of Mistrust
  2. Star Simpson at Freedom to Innovate
  3. Jonathan Zittrain at Freedom to Innovate

September 2015

  1. Lessig 2016: A radical institutionalist runs for President
  2. Renormalizing hitchhiking

August 2015

  1. Future of News: The View from Accra
  2. Digital Media, and Ghana’s Place on the Global Stage

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