Archive
Snooping Makes an Easy Road to Riches
Only 23 percent of Americans, a new Reuters poll says, consider former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden a "traitor" for blowing the whistle on the federal government's massive surveillance habit. Many Americans clearly do find the idea of government...
Eat Real
Is it just my friends, or is nearly everyone on an absurd diet these days? One friend says she's on a "primal" diet. She's trying to eat like cavemen and will devour wild game when she can get it. Another goes on a month-long "detox" fast each year. Somehow, he...
Metadata Mining Is Mega Awful
It's good to know that our friendly, über-secret National Security Agency is out there every day, protecting our freedom. By violating it. A whistleblower has blown the lid off the NSA's super-snoop program of rummaging electronically through about a billion phone...
Locking Up Our Future
Finally, there's a sign that our national passion for locking up more and more Americans could be subsiding. Our "correctional population" is gradually shrinking after decades of robust growth. We had 2.9 million people behind bars in 2011, down from 3.2 million in...
The Naked Dragnet Emperor
Don’t Squat in Your Spurs or Be an Idiot
June is the month of the summer solstice and America's biggest blizzard. I don't mean a weather event blowing in from the Arctic, but a merciless storm of words blowing from the mouths of commencement speakers at high school and college graduations. This year, I was...
The War on Terror Has Not Made Us Safer
Two days after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, I was sitting in front of my institute's office around the corner from the White House. We had just been evacuated again. The police patrolling the streets didn't have a clue what was going on. So we sat on...
This Week in OtherWords: June 12, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Timothy Karr discusses the surveillance scandal (Spygate?). We're also running immigration op-eds by the Sierra Club's Michael Brune and a mom who wants the ongoing reform efforts to include stronger protections for au pairs. Are you looking...
Dancing Around the First and Fourth Amendments
Whether you think spying is OK or not depends on your relationship to the information being collected. If you're on the gathering end, the invasion of someone else's privacy doesn't seem like a big deal. But if you're the one whose private life is being pried into,...
A More Sustainable Future for Us All
Like many great Americans, Sierra Club founder John Muir was an immigrant. It's only because the Scottish-born environmentalist visionary, who arrived in the United States at the age of 11 after a six-week sea voyage from Glasgow, was able to take advantage of the...
