The European Union’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, has a reputation as something of an activist because of her willingness to take on US tech giants. And yet she has approved what is, from a leftist activist point of view, a particularly evil deal, Germany-based Bayer’s acquisition of US-based Monsanto.　The $66 billion deal creates an incredible concentration in the seed and pesticide markets. If it’s approved in the US, too, the three biggest companies in this market -- Bayer-Mo

You had to be there.　As Americans took to the streets Saturday, defying a political order that, in Washington and many state capitals, has allowed extremists to write gun laws, the bodies -- of both the dead and the living who marched in their honor -- mattered a lot. Hundreds of thousands in cities big and small showed up. It was an extraordinary coming-out party for a movement that is now, at long last, undeniably mass.　The marches against gun violence would not have been as big without the un

Predicting the course of technological progress is extremely difficult. Just because worries about human obsolescence ultimately turned out to be misplaced in the Industrial Revolution doesn’t mean that the same happy result must necessarily prevail this time around. So the persistent question about artificial intelligence -- or “robots” in common parlance -- is whether they will make human workers obsolete.Recent rapid progress in machine learning -- a very powerful and flexible statistical pre

“Trump adviser” is an oxymoron. Thus it has always been, and thus it shall ever be.　President Donald Trump has rarely sought or heeded the advice of others, beginning several decades ago when he was a young developer in New York, through his years as a tabloid fixture and reality TV star, and on into the White House.　The president trusts his own instincts first and foremost, and lacks the attention span, curiosity and empathy to take other points of view on board. This should be no revelation to

With true friends, the more you learn about each other the more you like, trust and want to spend time with each other. With Facebook, the more I learn about their cavalier attitude toward users’ personal data, the more I don’t like, trust or want to spend time with them.　And the more I read about Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of the private data of more than 50 million Facebook users without their permission, the more stomach-turning I find it that the company celebrated its Feb. 4 anniversa

#DeleteFacebook is trending on social media. 　But you don’t have to do anything as radical as deleting the app that keeps you in touch with friends, family members and so many Russian bots. Instead, consider taking full control of your account. A few steps can eliminate Facebook as a nefarious actor in your life, wrestling it into submission as a benign app.　I have been a skeptic about Facebook pretty much from the beginning -- it’s likely a generational thing. I have had issues with the lack of

In China, don’t forget the ones that got away.　This month’s session of the National People’s Congress, the legislature that typically rubber stamps the Communist Party’s wishes, made plenty of headlines on personnel and policies. Also telling is what didn’t happen and who didn’t get what job.　Notable omissions send important signals on what type of economy the incoming cabinet envisages and how much latitude the central bank, itself under new leadership, will have to steer it.The broader task fo

Last Monday, James Levine, the longtime music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, was fired after the Met investigated his history of sexual abuse of young men, including teenagers. Levine sued the Met for $5.8 million for breach of contract and defamation.　Last Tuesday, a report surfaced that five women had accused the architect Richard Meier of groping, exhibitionism, assault and paying for silence. “While our recollections may differ,” Meier said in a statement, “I sincerely apolo