Weekly Picks – March 16, 2025

Credit (left to right): Omar Ashtawy / APA Images via ZUMA Press Wire; hakanyalicn via Shutterstock; ProPublica

This week’s collection:

The Material Creation of Freedom | Philosophy Now
What Happens When a Drone Strike Has No Killer and a War Has No Dead? | The Walrus
Just Another Liberalism? | The Hedgehog Review
Why I’m done talking to straight people about homophobia | Africa Is a Country
The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram | ProPublica

Find out how these lists are compiled at The Explainer.

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

Plus, a neat photo essay:

The Bone Hunters of Siberia | The New York Times

“When Biden was President he warned that his political opponents were a threat to democracy itself. Similar accusations were levelled against former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Indeed, many journalists and pundits claim that a threat to democracy is a global phenomenon. Conservatives have long criticized adversaries for being soft on crime, and liberals have slammed rivals for not caring about the poor; but to accuse the opposition of being ‘a threat to democracy’ seems to be a new low. But is it? Warnings like “Democracy will come to an end if you don’t listen to me!” are almost as old as the idea that the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer.

Since the formation of the earliest democratic republic, in Athens, pundits have been warning citizens of its imminent demise. For instance, in Book VIII of Plato’s Republic (c.380 BC), Socrates warns of democracy’s soft-on-crime tendencies, infatuation with youth, and excesses of equality extremism: “Have you not observed how, in a democracy, many persons, although sentenced to exile, just stay where they are and walk about the world?… old men condescend to the young … nor must I forget the equality of the two sexes… the excess of liberty passes to an excess of slavery… and so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.” And in Rome, the demise of the Republic seemed immanent when, after Marcus Livius Drusus was elected tribune in 121 BC, the friends of his rival Caius Gracchus cried foul. They accused Drusus of ballot tampering. In response, the supporters of Drusus chased down Caius and murdered him.

Democracy still had centuries of life in Greece and Rome, and the death predicted for democracy itself has never materialized. Yet democracies are born, and do die. How can we know if our own democracy is threatened?”

2. What Happens When a Drone Strike Has No Killer and a War Has No Dead?

“Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction but a very real expression of power—the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.

. . .

It may as well be the case that there exist two entirely different languages for the depiction of violence against victims of [the] empire and victims of empire. Victims of the empire, those who belong, those for whom we weep, are murdered, subjected to horror, their killers butchers and terrorists and savages. The rage every one of us should feel whenever an innocent human being is killed, the overwhelming sense that we have failed, collectively, that there is a rot in the way we have chosen to live, is present here, as it should be, as it always should be. Victims of empire aren’t murdered. Their killers aren’t butchers—their killers aren’t anything at all.

Victims of empire don’t die. They simply cease to exist. They burn away like fog.

To watch the descriptions of Palestinian suffering in much of mainstream Western media is to watch language employed for the exact opposite of language’s purpose—to watch the unmaking of meaning. When the Guardian runs a headline that reads, “Palestinian Journalist Hit in Head by Bullet During Raid on Terror Suspect’s Home,” it is not simply a case of hiding behind passive language so as to say as little as possible and in so doing risk as little criticism as possible.

Anyone who works with or has even the slightest respect for language will rage at or poke fun at these tortured, spineless headlines, but they serve a very real purpose. It is a direct line of consequence from buildings that mysteriously collapse and lives that mysteriously end to the well-meaning liberal who, weaned on such framing, can shrug their shoulders and say: Yes, it’s all so very sad but, you know, it’s all so very complicated.

Some things are complicated. Some things have been complicated.”

3. Just Another Liberalism?

“If critique could kill, neoliberalism would long be dead. So far, however, neither decades of intellectual opposition from the left and right nor the past decade of populist politics has done more than erode some measure of neoliberalism’s ideological preeminence. Talk from the right of “pro-family” policies, such as tax breaks and subsidies for having children, or moves by the Biden administration to secure domestic manufacturing of critical high-technology goods may hearten neoliberalism’s foes (even as they further blur the ideological map of American politics). Neither, however, offers anything like a consensus to replace the vision that, since the crises of the 1970s, has, with whatever degree of discontent, guided our collective thought and action.

. . .

While the rational, self-interested agent had long been a part of Western economic thought, he had existed alongside many other figures by which observers interpreted and tried to manipulate human action. The vain, self-flattering poseur skewered by early-modern French moralists; the sentimental man on whose sympathies melodramas played (and which Adam Smith analyzed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments); the capricious consumer to whom merchants and advertisers appealed; even the moral agent invoked by preachers and political reformers—all of these types existed alongside, and in tension with, “economic man” in the collective repertory of moral reasoning. This repertory was part of how liberals (and their opponents) understood and tried to govern their fellow men. What is remarkable about the 1970s, and the subsequent half century, is, from Foucault’s perspective, not that a “new” liberalism emerged (as, he implied, “new” liberalisms are continually emerging) through a reshuffling of economic policies, but that its ideological dominance was established through, or amid, the narrowing of this formerly expansive repertory down to a single, minimal figure of “economic man.”

If Foucault is right, then we are by no means approaching an end to neoliberalism, even as both neoliberalism and liberalism more broadly come under frequent attack. Many of the policies enacted or proposed in recent years for reorienting America’s economy and society are squarely within the past half century’s anthropological paradigm. Seeking to shape the incentives of individuals, families, and corporations in ways that align their self-interest with national goals, for example, through reforms aimed at increasing the number of American babies or semiconductors, resembles nothing so much as late-twentieth-century policies widely characterized as neoliberal.

. . .

Neoliberalism, understood in such terms, seems at once embattled and, possibly, quite secure. Alternatives to the manipulable “economic man”—such as the good citizen, the family man, the Christian, the communitarian, the ecologist, the aesthete, or the schizoid—may strike even those who wish to escape neoliberalism (or liberalism altogether) as more likely to remain themes of moralizing sermons than to become central conceptual instruments of a new order of governance. It can be right and good and joyful to insist that people are, or ought to be, more than “economic men,” but it is quite another thing to elaborate a set of motives to which policy can appeal, and on which it can act, that would be more effective than those of the manipulable, self-interested subject.”

4. Why I’m done talking to straight people about homophobia

“For too long, the world has understood homophobia only in its most grotesque manifestations—murder, imprisonment, and public violence. Straight people have only acknowledged homophobia when it spills blood or fills prison cells. But queer people know better. The destruction of queer lives does not begin with a hammer, a bullet, or a judge’s gavel … It begins with silence. With isolation. With erasure.

This is what straight people do not see. They do not see the quiet, grinding destruction of queer people long before they are murdered. They do not see the exhaustion of carrying an identity that is always at risk of being debated, isolated, criminalized, or erased.

I spent most of my life shaped by heteronormativity—by othering, by isolation. I began coming out at 20. By then I had already spent two decades being told, in every way possible, that my existence was unnatural, an abomination. Somehow, I made it into adulthood and became resistant to the world that had shaped me. That resistance was only short-lived. Adulthood came with the realization that my escape from the erasure and isolation of queer childhood was only the beginning. In adulthood, the law was there to ensure I did not exist in the public sphere. Some queer people do not even get this far. They do not get to 20. They do not get to come out. They fall off the radar. They commit suicide. Statistics show that LGBTQ+ teens consider suicide and make suicide attempts at about four times the rate for all adolescents. If they make it past the societal childhood destruction, they exist in the shadows, meeting men and women in dark alleys and clubs where they can never be seen. That is how the Down Low (DL) exists. That is how so many queer people are made—destroyed until their very existence is only in the shadows.

Heteronormativity—the very idea that heterosexuality is the normal sexuality and therefore should inform and shape the world that queer people exist in is a destructive institution. And straight people will always find, without provocation, ways to justify this destruction.”

5. The Rise and Fall of Terrorgram

“The Terrorgram story is part of a much larger 21st century phenomenon. Over the past two decades, massive social networks like X, Facebook and Telegram have emerged as a powerful force for both good and evil. The ability to connect with like-minded strangers helped fuel uprisings like the Arab Spring and Iran’s pro-democracy movements. But it has also aided extremists, including brutal jihadist organizations like the Islamic State group and white supremacists around the world.

. . .

The material illustrates the tension faced by every online platform: What limits should be imposed on the things users post or discuss? For years, social networks like Facebook and X employed thousands of people to review and take down offensive content, from pornography to racist memes to direct incitement of violence. The efforts at content moderation prompted complaints, primarily from conservatives, that the platforms were censoring conservative views of the world.

Telegram was created in 2013 by Pavel Durov, a Russian-born technologist, and his brother Nikolai. Pavel Durov, a billionaire who posts pictures of himself on Instagram, baring his chiseled torso amid rock formations and sand dunes, became the face of the company. He marketed the platform as a free-speech-focused alternative to the Silicon Valley social media platforms, which in the mid-2010s had begun aggressively policing disinformation and racist and dehumanizing content. Telegram’s restrictions were far more lax than those of its competitors, and it quickly became a hub for hate as well as illegal activity like child sexual exploitation and gunrunning.

Our review of thousands of Terrorgram posts shows that the lack of content moderation was crucial to the spread of the collective’s violent content. Telegram’s largely hands-off approach allowed Humber and her alleged confederates to reach an international audience of disaffected young people.

They encouraged these followers to turn their violent thoughts into action. And some of them did.”