For October’s Diversity Speaker Series session, we were pleased to welcome Ta-Nehisi Coates, the NYC-based writer, social commentator, editor for the Atlantic magazine, and resident scholar at MIT. In addition to his memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, he has written for Time magazine, the Village Voice, and the New York Times. His blog for the Atlantic is one of the most influential on the internet, covering everything from politics to pop culture to race in America.

For his ML session, Coates discussed how his blog is the anchor for a large, diverse, sometimes unwieldy commenting community, and how his choices have evolved over time to make for the most rich, civil interactions. ML student Nathan Matias, of the Center for Civic Media, extensively live-blogged this session at http://civic.mit.edu/blog/natematias/the-beauty-and-terror-of-commenting-communities-ta-nehisi-coates-at-the-media-lab.