Six demands, from a citizen to Big Tech — The stories turn up daily: Social media is being used to undermine democracy. Someone has run off with millions of Social Security numbers stored by a major financial institution. Internet service providers are selling our browsing history to marketers. There are machine-learning algorithms that literally don’t see black people. …

How to do a data detox, in a zillion easy steps — Hackers obtained the Social Security numbers of more than 145 million Americans. Paid political chaos monkeys allegedly harvested data from at least 87 million Facebook profiles in an effort to influence the 2016 U.S. election, the Brexit vote, and possibly more. …

This past August, I vacationed for three weeks with my girlfriend and her father. We traveled throughout England by rail, visiting mountains and coasts and monuments and seeing a lot of sheep. Sheep are to England what rats are to New York City…

My time at Rikers Island — Next Stop: The Garden! Rikers has a garden. Detainees used to raise chickens here, but we are told the chickens got eaten by wild hogs. Is this another veiled warning or subtle attempt to communicate the predatory environment of jail, or is it simply that they had chickens here until the wild hogs ate…

My time at Rikers Island — Want to get to know a city? Go to its jail, preferably as a visitor. That’s my conclusion after spending a day at Rikers Island in March of this year. After 10 years, I thought I knew New York City. I’ve visited the Museum of Modern Art. I’ve seen someone…