Rights and Democracy
Good News and Bad News about News
There's some good news about the news business for a change. The big headwound traditional media venues like newspapers and TV suffered with the advent of Internet ads is starting to heal. The bleeding has either stopped or slowed to a less-painful trickle for most...
Eavesdropping and Snooping for All
Hobby Lobby, Quit Your Needling
Hobby Lobby's position is really quite dubious: Using God to get into your uterus. It's needling its way into women's health. It's crafting strategies religiously stealth. The company's lawyers tell SCOTUS this amounts to abortion, And conservative justices believe...
Turning Professors into Martyrs
Margaret Mary Vojtko died last summer at age 83. Her death has turned her name into an emotional rallying cry for adjunct college teachers who are seeking justice from their schools. You see, Vojtko taught French classes for 25 years at Duquesne University in...
Bossy Is Bossy, Leadership Is Something Else
For someone who doesn't like the word "Bossy," Sheryl Sandberg sure likes to tell us what to do. "Lean in," "You can't have balance," "Get someone else to do your laundry for you." I'm not saying bossy's a good word. It can be used to paint girls as shrill. But it...
A Silver Anniversary for the World Wide Web
Exactly 25 years ago, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee conceptually "invented" the World Wide Web — and set in motion a process that would rapidly make the online world an essential part of our daily lives. By 1995, 14 percent of Americans were surfing...
Caught in the Act
Medical science has long known that the optic nerve runs from the retina of our eyeballs to the visual cortex of our brains, letting us see what's going on around us. Don't look now, but another "optic nerve" has evolved. Rather than running to our brains, however,...
Why You Should Fear Big Bad Cable
Twenty-five years ago this month, Sir Tim Berners-Lee introduced an open protocol for sharing information that gave everyday Internet users the power over what they created and whom they connected with online. His concept quickly evolved into the World Wide Web. One...
Exporting Extremism
In Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer has vetoed a bill that would have written anti-gay discrimination into state law in the name of religious freedom. In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni signed an even more extremist law that sentences LGBT people to life in prison and...
Ted Nugent Falls off His Rocker
Ted Nugent, the old rocker from the Seventies, is now just plain old. And off his rocker. A political novelty act for the far right and a front man for the National Rifle Association, Nugent regularly spews venomous, vulgar, race-laced, abusive hate speech about...
