Essays

In addition to several years of archives of my writing for PBS Need to Know, The Atlantic, Medium, the Columbia Journalism Review, and some other places like the New York Times, CNN, Salon, and elsewhere, I have occasionally written long-form essays. These will be linked below as rights become available.

Video game censorship is authoritarians’ latest tool to muzzle speech
Video game companies struggle to balance business growth with free speech.
BrookingsJoshua Foust
NFTs in Video Games Bring Laundered Money and Angry Players
Rushing to further monetize gaming adds to global social and environmental risk.
Foreign PolicyJoshua Foust
Addressing the policy challenges raised by NFT gaming
Axie Infinity demonstrates the need for regulators to implement better monitoring and consumer protection schemes.
BrookingsJoshua Foust
A guide to reining in data-driven video game design
As video games play an increasingly important role in society—as hugely popular forms of entertainment but also as an arena for contesting politics—data-driven game design raises questions about wh…
BrookingsJoshua Foust and Joseph Jerome
Video games are the new contested space for public policy
Video games are not only a contested cultural space in America, but also a contested political space in which governments and corporations, journalists and activists, and players of every stripe, a…
BrookingsJoshua Foust
Social Media Finally Broke the Public Sphere
Liberal democracies must work to recreate a sense of shared identity online.
Foreign PolicyJoshua Foust, Simon Frankel Pratt
Trump’s trans ban is just the latest effort by politicians to force LGBT people back in the closet
One of the most hopeful things I have seen in the past year came from Orrin Hatch, the Republican senator from Utah, who had a strong reaction to President Donald Trump’s surprise announcement of a ban on transgender Americans serving in the…
Mic
Americans don’t know their neighbors anymore—and that’s bad for the future of democracy
A dramatic reversal of privacy in our society created fault lines that were just waiting to be exploited. Then along came Donald J. Trump.
QuartzThe A.V. Club
Mockery and Malarkey in the IC - The American Interest
The Petraeus affair has exposed the hollowness of U.S. intelligence classification decisions and made a mockery of the justice system.
The American InterestJoshua Foust
Can Fancy Bear Be Stopped? The Clear and Present Danger of Russian Info Ops
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell was curt to his former aide. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump “is a national disgrace and an
War on the RocksJoshua Foust
What It’s Like to Be Gay in the Ultra-Masculine NatSec Community
Even post-“don’t ask, don’t tell,” it’s still a world of homophobic slurs and awkward questions about my “wife.”
Foreign PolicyJoshua Foust
Fort Meade, We Have a Problem …
This past July, the highest profile hacker conference in America – known as DEFCON – made a show of publicly disinviting all federal employees from attending. It was a shock, and a reversal: Last…
TPM – Talking Points Memodb
The Geek Awakening
Edward Snowden is the vanguard of a broader challenge
State of PlayJoshua Foust