Bevir Media Inc.

When I was twelve years old, I was fascinated by psychic powers. Who wouldn’t be? It’s a provocative notion, to be able to reach out and push things around, hear what other people are thinking, or tell the future, all just by using your mind. I read everything I could find about ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognition—the whole gamut of mental abilities that stretched beyond the ordinary. I was a big fan of comic books, where all the heroes were endowed with superpowers, but also of science-fiction and fantasy stories, not to mention straightforwardly “scientific” accounts of what purported to be evidence for human capabilities beyond the normal. I wanted to penetrate the mystery, figure out how this kind of thing could really work. So eventually I decided on the obvious course of action—I would perform my own experiments. I started with small things like dice and coins, placed carefully on a smooth tabletop. Then I just … thought at them. I conce...

The late afternoon sun was beginning to settle into a one of those early spring New York City chills when I heard it behind me: Woooo! Wooooohaaahoooo! Wooooo! A brief pause, and then, alarmingly, another Wooo-woooo! The sound, a kind of cross between a yodel and a scream, was coming from Michael DeLuca, a 21-year old New York University student standing with his arms flung high in the air. He had a camera slung around his neck and a Bernie Sanders sticker on his chest. DeLuca and his friend Cristina Gnecco, also 21, were flush up against a metal barricade, surrounded by some 27,000 people who gathered in Washington Square Park last week to support Sanders before tomorrow’s New York primary. In a city that's home to the bright lights of Broadway, arguably the hottest tickets in town (ok, with the exception of Hamilton ) have been Sanders' rallies. But it wasn’t the Vermont senator that DeLuca was positively losing his shit over at that very moment. It was ...

Donald Trump’s plan to kick 11 million undocumented immigrants out of the United States over the course of two years sounds impractical. How impractical? Well, for starters, it would eviscerate the economy and reduce the country’s GDP by hundreds of billions of dollars. So: pretty impractical! That’s the conclusion of a report released today by the center-right think tank American Action Forum, which quantified just how much labor and productivity would be lost if Trump’s plans became reality. The group’s conclusions are terrifying—and they’re supposed to be. This week, Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, leaving #NeverTrump moderate GOPers with the unenviable task of convincing their more conservative colleagues that a Trump presidency would be a disaster for their own pro-business agenda. Relying on data rather than morality, the AAF paints a picture of a dystopian future under President Trump in which deported immigrants would leave a gaping hole ...

Billionaire investor and Facebook board member Peter Thiel has never shied away from contrarian ideas. He thinks kids should drop out of college to launch a startup. He’s backed efforts to build floating cities in international waters. But in the liberal bastion that is San Francisco, Thiel’s latest move may be the most daring yet: Thiel is going to be a California delegate for Donald Trump. On Monday, Trump filed his slate of delegates for California, and right there on the list for Trump’s 12th Congressional District picks is Peter Thiel. That Thiel would support any Republican candidate is not all that surprising. In 2012, he was a major backer for Ron Paul, and last summer, he donated $2 million to Carly Fiorina’s Super PAC. In the techtopia of Silicon Valley, Thiel is certainly not alone in his libertarian beliefs. And yet, Trump is a different kind of candidate. He has become a particularly divisive figure among tech elites, particularly for his stance on ...

Donald Trump has proven a lot of people wrong, and not just because a year ago today none of us—perhaps not even Trump—would have imagined in our wildest fever dreams that he would wake up May 4, 2016 as the presumptive Republican nominee. It’s also because his win in Indiana last night, which prompted Ted Cruz to drop out of the race, suggests that data—the kind Cruz fastidiously gathered—might not matter all that much to a presidential campaign. After the 2012 election, the prevailing theory was that data had been President Obama’s secret weapon against Mitt Romney. The campaign’s number crunchers sat in a separate space called The Cave, rubbing elbows with the likes of Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt and identifying key voters using an internal database named Narwhal. After Obama’s win, the occupants of the Cave got a lot of the credit, and strategists predicted that no candidate could ever win again without ample data on their side. But those people were wron...

Facebook may be the latest Silicon Valley company to be accused of political bias this election cycle. But it’s not the first. And it most certainly won’t be the last. The US Senate Commerce Committee is asking Facebook for answers after a Gizmodo report alleged that the company’s news curators have been deliberately suppressing conservative news from surfacing in its Trending Topics. In a letter sent to CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, the committee asks for a thorough explanation of how Trending Topics work, what the guidelines are for determining which topics to include or remove, under what circumstances a curator might inject a story into Trending Topics, and more. Tom Stocky, Facebook’s head of Trending Topics, has already responded to the original report, writing that reviewers are trained to “disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources.” Still, questions abound about just what exactly constitutes “junk.” The fact is...