Olivia Goldhill

To be a highly-cited researcher is a mark of achievement in science. The number of times someone’s work gets referenced indicates influence: If an author hasn’t been cited, they haven’t had much effect on their field of study; if they’ve been cited hundreds of times, their research is probably pretty important. Unless they’re just citing themselves, that is.

The first states in the United States are working to legalize magic mushrooms. The movement is in its nascent stages, but following the path of the cannabis in the US, different models of decriminalization are already emerging.

Cambridge Analytica, the most notorious practitioner of psychological profiling, has closed shop. Their methods aren’t about to die out so easily.

In the six years since Lean In was published, Sheryl Sandberg’s capitalist brand of feminism has been embraced, rejected, and intensely debated within the professional sphere. Amidst this public examination of the work lives of women, a similarly capitalist approach to feminism has infiltrated our personal lives, this one with barely a murmur of recognition.

Politicians around the world have been happily nudging us for at least a decade. Making pension programs opt-in by default to encourage higher enrollment rates? Nudge. Labeling rubbish bins “landfill” to increase recycling? Nudge nudge.  

Earlier this month, when United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a commission that would “review of the role of human rights in American foreign policy,” his declaration was met with fear. The “unalienable rights” laid out in the the US Declaration of Independence—“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—are inspiring, but highly unspecific. A refined definition could restrict rather than embrace human rights. 

In the last decade, psychological advisors have gone from an oddity to standard feature of major political campaigns. Back in 2008, when Barack Obama turned to a group of behavioral scientists to help him win the United States presidential election, their worth was yet unproven. 

A newly created consultancy firm is planning to give corporations a strategic edge, not with legal or technological advice, but philosophical insights. Philosophical Applications, launched just three weeks ago, offers services to companies in need of “ethical awareness” guidance and “catastrophe anticipation and avoidance.” 

Quartz reporter Olivia Goldhill takes readers’ questions on her field guide about the giant market for your personal data.

Brazil’s far-right leadership is very much a family affair. President Jair Bolsonaro, known as the “Trump of the Tropics,” relies on his sons—Eduardo, Carlos, and Flávio—as his closest advisors. Other politicians despair at the dynastic state of affairs. “I’m despondent that crucial decisions about Brazil are being made between spaghetti and dessert on a Sunday night,” Brazil’s Worker’s Party congressman Orlando Silva told Quartz. 

Alexandre Frota is not a caricature. He may have the body of an action figure, with such toweringly muscular shoulders it’s a wonder he isn’t off-balance. And he may sound like a parody of misogyny, complaining that he dislikes feminists because they “urinate standing up.” But Frota, who made his fame in Brazil as an actor and porn star, is now a congressman in President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right Social Liberal Party (PSL) party. And he has a serious voice and following. 

Apps designed to help people lose weight, track pregnancy, and have better sex are sharing personal information with third parties, often without making such practices clear to users. Quartz used an intercept tool to test several popular wellness apps and found users’ length of pregnancy and BMI bracket shared with Facebook, Google, and digital marketing agencies. Meanwhile, a sex app quietly shared users’ location data. Some of these apps’ privacy policies were difficult to locate or misleading. The information Quartz found apps sharing with third parties includes:

Ron Wyden is ready for a fight. Last year, the Oregon Senator exposed cell phone carriers for selling real-time location-tracking data to third parties, without checking that these customers had legal authority to track cell phone users. They promised to stop, but didn’t keep that promise.

Since April, groups have gathered outside Bergdorf Goodman on Sundays to join E. Jean Carroll’s walking tour of the “most hideous men of New York.” The meeting place’s significance only became clear two weeks ago. In June, Carroll published an article alleging that US president Donald Trump raped her in the storied department store in the mid-‘90s. “Now the secret’s out,” she told a group of 16 who joined on July 7, the first tour since she made her accusations public. 

Six weeks after the Brazilian politician Manuela d’Ávila gave birth, a stranger approached and started hitting the sling cradling her child. “Did you buy this in Miami?,” the woman asked d’Ávila, who in a few short years would go on to lose the 2018 bid to be Brazil’s vice president. The question parroted disinformation, spread around Brazil, that d’Ávila had splurged on baby products abroad.

When Judge Robert Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1987, a reporter for the weekly Washington City Paper discovered they both used the same video rental store. He popped in, asked for a list Bork’s rented movies, and published an article revealing the judge’s love of Hitchcock films and British costume dramas.

My current to-do list is 2,644 words long. There’s a plan for each day of the upcoming next week, then a jumble of notes on administrative tasks I need to sort into order, sections for work and personal chores, followed by future important dates, lists of tidbits to remember, books to read, and movies to watch.

In this mini-series, we look again at media we have loved to consider how it depicted gender. How does it look to a person with a 2019 perspective on gender roles and norms? Warning: Contains spoilers.

In its bid to create the very best technology, Apple decided, in 2014, to employ a full-time philosopher. The company hired Joshua Cohen, formerly a political philosophy professor at Stanford University to work at Apple University, an institution created by Steve Jobs in 2008 to offer employees the kind of training typically available at university programs. The specifics of this university are kept tightly under wraps; Apple specifically prohibited Cohen from talking about his work with Quartz.

Social media offers the chance to carefully curate a public image and, while some choose to broadcast their professional success or vacations, others are keen to make a show of their moral worth. You’ve seen the messages on Twitter or Facebook: “Give a compliment, it can make someone’s day.” “Please, be kind.” These and similar messages emphatically condemn someone else’s behavior, or call for some moral act.

When someone’s especially cooperative, don’t thank their easy-going nature, but give credit to their brain. A team of New York University psychologists hypothesized that cooperation depends on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DPC), an area of the brain in the frontal lobe involved in regulation control and goal pursuit; after all, cooperation often requires reigning in one’s naughty impulses to take everything for themselves. To test their theory, the researchers conducted an experiment involving participants with brain damage to the DPC—and discovered someone who would not cooperate at all.

To read a man’s mind, first you have to outline his skull.

Lyft is keen to prove itself as a supportive employer and, to that end, has unrolled a considerate mental health strategy for full-time employees. The initiative includes a guide for managers on how to respond to signs of poor mental health among their staff, and will benefit those software engineers, marketing directors, and accountants working at the company full time. The guidance is nuanced, but there are no plans to consider the mental health of Lyft’s drivers, whom are legally classified as contractors and so denied such benefits.

Fears about robots tend to focus on how advanced machines could change, or destroy, human society. One organization, though, is focused on the opposite perspective: How humans could harm robots.