Jared Keller

Writer for hire

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Wikipedia’s been dealing with fake news for 16 years, and we’ve developed very extensive policies for determining what is a reliable source or not

I talked to a bunch of smart folks about Wikipedia’s mission to build an army of fact-checkers to battle ‘fake news’ for Pacific Standard. Read more here.

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Sixty-Seven Numbers That Define the Obama Era

Health care, drone strikes, and a shrinking unemployment rate: a look at the figures that will define Obama’s legacy — for better and worse.

My by-the-numbers tribute to former President Obama, up at Pacific Standard.

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How Squarespace Designed a Sophisticated Headquarters Where Grownups Get Things Done

It’s 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, and 332 Squarespace employees are working in the company’s new Manhattan offices. The space, designed by New York architect firm A+I (which also designed offices for Tumblr, HBO and iHeart Media), is three floors of wood and concrete. “Open spaces ensure communication and collaboration,” says CFO Nicole Anasenes, “but the office is also dotted with closed-off offices — intimate, private spaces to encourage creativity.” So what’s everyone up to today?

I’m writing a regular feature for Entrepreneur called ‘In The Office’ on workplace culture and design. The first installment, in the January/February issue, is on website builder Squarespace.

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The Case For Arguing Politics With Your Family at Thanksgiving

On Thursday, I’ll sit down to devour turkey and stuffing with my father, who, like me registered Independent for personal and professional purposes; my mother, whose political affiliations are none of any of our business; my right-leaning political consultant brother and his Democrat wife up from Washington, D.C.; my knee-jerk lefty aunt and uncle and their high-school aged son (who constantly ridicules me for my horrible Instagram technique); my highly conservative aunt, a high-powered lawyer, and uncle, a federal judge, from New York; and my grandparents, both brilliant historians and prolific academics who’ve traversed the political spectrum throughout the course of their lives (our dog wrote in Marco Rubio on the ballot). To the untrained eye, our Thanksgiving table will look like we’ve assembled the components of a thermonuclear device set to devastate our Boston suburb — or, at the very least, the sanctity of my mother’s dining room.

But, despite the fissures and cracks in the American polity that the unlikely ascension of Trump has laid bare, there will be no political apocalypse at the Keller household. This isn’t to say my family is anything special. We can, and will, argue: My relatives are too talkative, my brother too smart, and myself too stubborn to leave the battlefield without a scalp.

But that’s the thing: More than any long-winded rant on Facebook or shouting match with a Twitter egg, I firmly believe that fighting about politics with your family is the best way to overcome any confusion and ennui of this past election. Warring with strangers online may have left us tired and furious, but political disagreement at the dinner table can actually be a political salve — if you let it.

If you showed up at Thanksgiving armed with an arsenal of explainer-made political factoids, chances are you’re the one your family is dreading seeing. Read more at Pacific Standard

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The Strange Case of George Washington’s Disappearing Sash

One winter day in December 1775, months after the battles at Concord and Lexington marked the beginning of the Revolutionary War, the nascent American military formally met its commander-in-chief. A group of Virginia rifleman found themselves in the middle of a massive snowball fight with a regiment of quick-talking New Englanders who ridiculed the strangely dressed Virginians in their “white linen frocks, ruffled and fringed.” The colonies were still strangers to each other at this point: The Declaration of Independence was months away, and the ragtag army representing the rebels was far from formally “American.” The meeting of nearly 1,000 soldiers quickly devolved into an all-out brawl on the snowy grounds of Harvard Yard.

But as quickly as it had begun, the fighting screeched to a halt. A man charged into the middle of the fray on horseback, seizing two men into the air with his bare hands and ordering the militiamen to stand down. Few of the assembled soldiers recognized him as George Washington: Most Americans barely knew what the untested general looked like, let alone anything about his mettle. But part of his uniform announced his identity: his sash. The blue-green shimmering ribbon of silk caught the afternoon light, a formal sign of his command and, according to historians, one of the earliest symbols of national identity in a nascent country that lacked a constitution and a flag. The snowball fight ceased immediately — the general was on the prowl.

George Washington’s sash remains one of the Revolutionary War’s most extraordinary artifacts. Like the unknown Virginian leading the rebellion against the British, the powder-blue ribbon became one of the earliest symbols of the United States. But for some reason, the sash has languished in relative obscurity, resigned to back rooms and dusty archives for decades— until now.

I had the privilege of examining George Washington’s legendary moire silk sash, one of the oldest (and most overlooked) relics of the American Revolution, for Smithsonian. Read more here.

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I strongly believe that media literacy and communication should be taught at a much younger age. Teachers don’t normally approach this content until the college level, and students continually have trouble determining what aspects of an article and website to examine to determine whether it’s actually something they want to cite or circulate. ... It starts with actually reading what we are sharing. And it’s hard! Look, I’m a professor of media and I’ve been guilty of seeing something posted by a friend I trust and sharing it. I’ve been complicit in this system. The first thing we need to do is get people to actually read what they’re sharing, and, if it’s too much trouble to do that, we’re going to have serious difficulty getting people to look up and evaluate their sources of information.

I spoke to the professor who’s spending her time calling out those fake and misleading “news” sites clogging your Facebook feed in that viral Google Doc cheat sheet. Read the whole interview at Pacific Standard.

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Donald Trump’s Grand Troll Campaign Is Just Getting Started

To the list of valuable things destroyed by the internet — privacy, childhood innocence, newspapers — the 2016 presidential campaign has added another victim: civil society. Donald Trump can claim much of the credit for this, along with other dubious trophies such as ushering uninvited vagina-grabbing into the pantheon of campaign quotes. Trump has drawn his techniques from the encyclopedia of Reddit and 4chan and Twitter, following a political program that has no greater goal than maximizing exposure. Those techniques have gotten him within steps of the presidency. And when the campaign is over, he'll likely cash in on them, adding Trump-branded cable-TV vitriol to his portfolio of suits, steaks, and hotels.

Trolling is as old as the internet itself, tracing its origins to the earliest Usenet groups of the Eighties and Nineties. It's become a mainstream phenomenon with the cultural ascendancy of communities like 4chan. If the original trolls started with a playfulness drawn from the counterculture, twenty years of practice has honed the techniques of the trolls and simplified their message. "Trolls," says Whitney Phillips, digital media folklorist and scholar of internet history, who has become the go-to authority on trolling, "are, very simply, a group of people who deliberately harness media sensationalism and outrage to fuck with people." They are not new. It's just that it's the first time one of their own is running for president.

In my first story for the Village Voice, I examined how the Trump campaign transformed trolling from an Internet phenomenon to a mainstream political tactic. Read more here.

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How the Trump Campaign Exposed America’s Sleeping Authoritarianism

Almost exactly four years ago, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter offered a dire warning to the crowd of nearly 1,300 people assembled in Concord, New Hampshire: America’s civil religion, built on an abiding devotion to Republican principles, is on the verge of collapse.

“If we know who is responsible, I have enough faith in the American people to demand performance from those responsible,” Souter said, speaking of voters and the democratic process, less than two months before Barack Obama would defeat Republican challenger Mitt Romney at the polls. “If we don’t know, we will stay away from the polls. We will not demand it. And the day will come when somebody will come forward and we and the government will in effect say, ‘Take the ball and run with it. Do what you have to do.’ That is the way democracy dies. And if something is not done to improve the level of civic knowledge, that is what you should worry about at night.”

When considered in the context of Donald Trump’s campaign, Souter’s warning is eerily prescient (as, to her credit, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow astutely observed first observed last week). Of course, democratic societies have always struggled to nurture republicanism; just consider Benjamin Franklin’s famous assertion that the United States would be “a Republic … if you can keep it.” But after 240 years, America’s extraordinary experience is showing signs of wavering: New data on American values suggests the 2016 campaign has forced civil society to an unprecedented breaking point.

I wrote a short essay on the steady erosion of American republicanism for Pacific Standard. Read more here.

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The Long, Strange History of the October Surprise

Friday, October 7, may have been among the strangest, most tumultuous days in American political history. No fewer than three events occurred that in any other campaign would have shocked the nation. Most infamously, The Washington Post released a devastating 2005 video showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women: “When you're a star they let you do it.” Moments later, Wikileaks released the transcripts of some of the Wall Street speeches delivered by Hillary Clinton, which had been a contentious point during the Democratic primary.

This was all just hours after Trump had claimed that the “Central Park Five” were guilty, even though the suspects in the 1989 case were exonerated through DNA evidence and the true perpetrator has confessed. It was a day of “October Surprises” after the previous week had already had a few of them, including revelations from The New York Times that the Republican may have avoided paying federal taxes for some 18 years. The term “October Surprise” was coined by a 1980s political operative but has ever since been appropriated by the media to describe unexpected political disasters in the twilight hours of the campaign. Sometimes they are intentionally positioned by political opponents to impact voters, often days before they head to the polls. They aren’t always successful, but they’ve become a staple of modern politics. Though the term was coined by Reagan campaign manager and future CIA director William Casey during the 1980 campaign, the October surprise enjoyed a long, unusual history even before it entered American political vernacular

I wrote about late-campaign shenanigans bloody and diplomatic for Smithsonian. Read more here.

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The Creeping Tyranny of Designated Survivor

Designated Survivor is the spiritual successor to 24 as the preeminent vision of the imperial executive and its inevitable conclusion, the abrogation of civil liberties. It’s not that the Kirkland’s response isn’t unjustified: The fictional destruction of the Capitol is the worst attack on the the federal government since British Major General Robert Ross torched Washington D.C. during the War of 1812. But it’s the casual reproduction of the post-9/11 surveillance society under the auspices of a counter-terrorism nail-biter that makes the series difficult to swallow. Law enforcement officials casually drop references to the terror attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, and Orlando as a reminder that the world they occupy is ostensibly “real”; there’s even a casual, lighthearted reference to PRISM, the NSA internet communications dragnet (and historic middle finger to the Fourth Amendment) revealed by Edward Snowden’s 2013 leaks. Where Bauer’s torture of terrorists was “good for you,” in Surnow’s terms, the growing powers of the executive branch and their consequences are here reduced to something harmless — a joke.

I fucking hate this show and Pacific Standard let me rant about it for a bit. Read more here.

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Raiders of the Lost Art How 9/11 spawned one of the most unusual art preservation efforts of the modern era.

Like the 2,500 9/11 artifacts that lay forgotten in an airplane hangar at John F. Kennedy Airport until this July, they’d entered a strange limbo unique to the art world. Damaged beyond restoration, they were declared a “total loss,” a classification attributed to objects deemed devoid of any market value by insurers and resigned to warehouses and storage spaces while their legal owners are paid an indemnity—often destined to be forgotten and unappreciated as a quirk of the art insurance market. While fragments of Bent Propellor and Three Shades live on in the 9/11 Memorial and act as physical testaments to the world-historical trauma that was that fateful day, other artifacts have been subsumed under a strange new legal definition: “not art.”

In addition to the resounding change that transformed the nation in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, an unusual window was opened into the strange afterlife of a different facet of humanity—the art that defined the spaces occupied and often cherished by the individuals lost in the tragedy. Understanding this phenomenon involves unearthing lost works not through layers of dirt and rubble, soil and ash, but through the tangle of money and contract, ownership and value. What does it mean when a work of art laden with meaning and significance is declared valueless? When did “art” become a legal standing and not an aesthetic one? And more importantly: Where do all these pieces actually go when the bond of physical ownership dissolves?

It’s up to the art world’s most unusual archaeologists to find out.

I spent months reporting this feature on salvage art in the post-9/11 world. It was meant to appear in the print edition of Smithsonian, but I’m pleased it found a home at The Daily Beast. Read the whole damn thing.

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Gene Wilder’s Other Legacy: His Fight Against Ovarian Cancer

In 2005, Gene Wilder traveled to New York City from his home in Connecticut for one of the most important openings of his life. It wasn’t one of the notoriously private comedian’s side-splitting movies, or the stage version of The Producers on Broadway. (He starred in the 1968 film across from Zero Mostel.)

He was there for the opening of Gilda Radner Way, as the section of West Houston Street between Sixth Avenue and Varick had just been renamed. Sixteen years earlier, he had lost his wife, comedian Gilda Radner, to ovarian cancer. Soon after, he had thrown himself into activism around the disease: In 1995 he had helped found the nonprofit support network Gilda’s Club (housed on the corner of Houston and Sixth). The renaming was in celebration of the nonprofit’s 10th anniversary, commemorating the place where families touched by the scourge of cancer had come together to share emotional and social support with one another.

Wilder, who died at 83 this Sunday, was devastated by Radner’s death—and convinced that Radner had suffered more greatly because her doctors were less aware of the condition, which delayed her diagnosis. When they ultimately realized what was wrong, it was too late.

I wrote a short story about Gilda’s Club and Gene Wilder’s legacy of cancer activism for Slate.

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‘The Night Of’ and the Enduring Power of Police Procedurals

To understand the allure of The Night Of, the latest stylized crime drama from HBO, just turn to the golden rule of the American criminal justice system: “The truth doesn’t help you, and if you can’t get that through your head, you can forget about the rest of your life.”

That’s the advice imparted by disheveled ambulance-chaser John Stone (a masterful John Turturro) to Nasir Khan (Riz Ahmed), a 20-something Pakistani-American college student accused of viciously murdering a young woman on New York’s Upper West Side in new crime drama The Night Of(an American adaptation of the British series Criminal Justice). The Night Offollows Khan’s circuitous route through the criminal justice system, from arrest to incarceration to trial. Khan’s crime is shrouded in uncertainty: After meeting victim Andrea Cornish (Sofia Black D’Elia) while borrowing his father’s cab, the two drink (Khan doesn’t really), take drugs (we don’t know which ones) and make love (we think) before Khan awakens at Cornish’s kitchen table, only to find her dead upstairs. Panicked, he flees the scene before being arrested and indicted. Whether Khan committed the heinous crime is left vague, even to the viewer, but the message of the series is clear:In the criminal justice system, the truth will not always set you free.

The Night Of is one of the most enthralling police procedurals to hit television in years, a gritty narrative that interweaves every minute detail Khan’s life with the humdrum doings of the civil servants and private citizens caught in his legal conundrum. The show comes in the midst of a true-crime revolution for the American public: Mega-popular series likeMaking a Murderer and Serial have both brought the legal and moral ambiguities of murder investigations to hundreds of thousands of devoted followers each week, enough to catalyze retrials for both series’ alleged perpetrators, Brendan Dassey and Adnan Syed. Even OJ: Made in America,the in-depth documentary produced by ESPN, transfixed viewers with the careful, deeply personal recounting of a sensational trial that’s more than two decades old. With series like The Night Of and its gruesome cousins, we are living in the golden age of true crime — which coincides with a period of widespread ambivalence about the process of justice in America.

I wrote an essay for Pacific Standard on HBO’s The Night Of as a reflection of America’s abiding obsession with crime and punishment.

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The Scariest Part About America’s LGBTQ Suicide Epidemic Is What We Don’t Know About It

On August 12, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released results from the 2015 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBS), a biannual poll designed to monitor high school student health. For the first time ever, states and schools were given the option to include questions about respondents' sexuality. Twenty-five states and 19 large urban school districts chose to do so, and as such, the survey marked the first nationally representative census of lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth health in America.

Results, predictably, were grim. In almost every facet of their personal health, LGB students fare worse than their peers. Twenty-three percent reported experiencing sexual dating violence, and 18 percent reported experiencing physical dating violence, compared with 9 percent and 8 percent of heterosexual students, respectively. More than 10 percent said they've had to miss school at least once during the past month out of concern for their safety.

Perhaps most shocking was the data pertaining to suicide: Some 29.4 percent of LGB students tried to kill themselves in 2015, almost five times as many as straight students. And 42.8 percent experienced some form of suicidal ideation.

In my first story for Vice, I examined how the CDC’s patchwork data collection methods are a major obstacle to combatting the suicide epidemic ravaging LGBTQ communities.

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Your Kids Are Better Behaved Than You

There’s something terribly wrong with kids these days: a series of major surveys, conducted by the government every two years, suggest that they might just be the most well-behaved generation in recent memory.

Teens are increasingly swearing off alcohol, cigarettes, drugs like synthetic marijuana, and prescription painkillers, according to the latest survey of of more than 50,000 8th, 10th, and 12th graders from the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey. For some illicit substances, such as cocaine and heroin, consumption has dropped to its lowest point since the MTF’s inception in 1975 (fading stigmas around marijuana consumption may be responsible for its relatively consistent popularity amid this decline). The most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) shows that cigarette smoking is at its lowest level in 24 years—11 percent in 2015, down from 28 percent in 1991. Rates of underage sex, teen pregnancy, HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases have also declined according to a survey of 16,000 students by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The kids, apparently, are all right.

But why? Conventional wisdom suggests this shouldn’t be the case. This is a generation that’s taking its cues from their Baby Boomer parents, those 76 million Americans born roughly between 1946 and 1964 who are veterans of the sexual and psychedelic revolutions of the 1960s and 70s and launched the modern trends in risky behaviors measured by surveys like the MTF and YRBS. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Baby Boomers have maintained their hard-partying ways more than any other generation.

Parental attitudes towards addiction matter. Research suggests that children of addicted parents are more likely to develop substance abuse problems themselves—due to both modeling and lax oversight. A recent longitudinal study of adolescents between 1994 and 2008 confirms that parents with permissive attitudes tend to breed self-destructive behaviors in their children; by contrast, the children of authoritative parents (or were even connected to authoritative adults through friends) were “40 percent less likely to drink to the point of drunkenness, 38 percent less likely to binge drink, 39 percent less likely to smoke cigarettes, and 43 percent less likely to use marijuana.”

So why are today’s young people resisting the allure of binge-drinking and illicit drugs that ensnared their Boomer parents? Perhaps it is precisely due to Baby Boomers’ libertine drug experiences that their children are inclined to avoid substance abuse.

In my first story for The Daily Beast, I follow up on my Pacific Standard examination of today’s squeaky-clean teens. Why are today’s kids so well behaved? Because their parents weren’t at all.

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You have to understand that the species itself is almost over.

For Pacific Standard, I interviewed Transhumanist Party presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan about American attitudes toward transhumanism, the future of the human condition, and his grand strategy going into the general election.

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All the Extremely Absurd Ways People Are Fighting Zika at the Rio Olympics

Donning facial masks, wearing Zika-proof uniforms and freezing sperm: Does any of this stuff actually work?

The short answer is “no, not really.” I investigate for Smithsonian.