CRYPTOCURRENCY’S BLEND OF OPAQUE TECHNICAL JARGON, obtuse regulatory schema, and flagrant gambling has, since its inception, made it a magnet for characters you could generously call “colorful.” This was the case in 1992 when a squad of anarcho-libertarian Neal Stephenson fans first started gossiping about the idea on the cryptography listserv “Cypherpunks.” It was likewise true in 2008 when someone (or multiple people) using the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto sicced Bitcoin on the internet. Nakamoto—speculated, at various points, to be a Rhodesian cartel boss, a Palm Beach County detective who died

“WHAT DO RAPE VICTIMS WANT?” At the height of #MeToo, this question was asked a lot. “What’s really important,” we would be told, with the furrowed brow of someone seeking to assure us of their own seriousness, “is what the victims want.” The rape victim became an offstage moral authority, someone whose judgment could be deferred to. But most often, her supposed desires were evoked to lend legitimacy to somebody else’s project. On the far left, prison abolitionists told us that rape victims didn’t really want their attackers to be punished; instead, they wanted forgiveness, rehabilitation, a

WHEN KERRY HOWLEY PUBLISHED HER FIRST BOOK, Thrown, in 2014, bookstores labeled it a “nonfiction novel.” Its journalistic bona fides were somewhat straightforward—Howley embedded with two real lesser-known mixed-martial-arts fighters for three years, documenting the lengths they went to hone and destroy their bodies in real professional combat. The “novel” addendum stemmed from the book’s first-person narrator—a woman identified not as “Kerry” but “Kit,” a philosophy student who wanders out of an academic Husserl conference into a “Midwest Cage Championship,” where she encounters for the first

“These days ecstasy is indeed out of fashion,” the late critic Ellen Willis wrote, despairingly, in 1992. The quest for an ecstatic existence had once inspired Willis to seek a new life; to leave her first husband, move to the East Village, and, eventually, form the radical feminist group Redstockings. Her brand of feminism (often called “pro-sex”) bristled against the division of sexual expression into categories of good and bad, and rejected the anti-porn movement’s moralism, which Willis saw as essentially conservative. Willis envisioned a world in which women embraced bolder, trickier

THE WORLDS CONJURED in analytic philosophy are strange ones, in which abstract persons are trapped in a shifting kaleidoscope of hypotheticals, posited obligations, infinite regressions, near and far possible worlds. Even after the so-called applied turn in the last century of ethics and political philosophy, the tendency by professional thinkers to treat every real-world problem as a logic puzzle persists. 

This approach has extended to analytic philosophers’ theorizing about reparations for slavery. Some, like political philosopher Bernard Boxill, have urged an approach situated in Lockean

IN 2004, DAISY PITKIN, a young staff organizer for the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), is recounting the union’s history to a group of ironworkers, roofers, painters, and laundry workers assembled for organizing training. She begins with the founding of UNITE’s predecessor, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, in 1900, and continues with the strike by New York City garment workers, nine years later, that came to be known as the Uprising of the 20,000. She tells her audience how Clara Lemlich, a twenty-three-old garment worker, called for the strike

WHAT WAS ELON MUSK PLANNING when he began to quietly buy up Twitter stock in late January of this year? In paperwork filed with the SEC, Musk originally indicated he had no designs on becoming an activist investor, and when his stake—at that point just over 9 percent—was made public in April, Musk accepted an invitation to join the company’s board. A few days later, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced that Musk had changed his mind and would not be joining the board, and less than a week later, Musk announced a takeover offer: he would buy out stockholders at the theoretically humorous price

LAST YEAR, during a diversity workshop I was required to take for work, the facilitators asked each of us to share the moment we first became aware of class inequality. One of them gave her example to “get us started” and told us about the time she visited a wealthier classmate’s house and saw a bidet in the bathroom. I think we were meant to laugh, but I kept wondering if this “rich person” was maybe just Japanese. Details aside, I was confused. You would have to live in an absolute cultural vacuum not to realize until that point in life that rich people existed. The class divide was the very