Tag Archives: thought police

What matters most

Posted on August 8, 2015 by

A recent opinion article by Roger Cohen about a book and polling data demonstrating a gulf in transatlantic public opinion struck me as a windy but representative example of the unnecessary polarization in our political debate.  We find more visceral examples of this bifurcated outrage … Continue reading →

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Politics, Propaganda and Pornography on the Web in China

Posted on July 12, 2013 by

A recent New York Review of Books post by Perry Link is worth reading to learn the lengths and depths to which the Chinese government will go to control content and opinion on the Internet in that country.  China has learned to … Continue reading →

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“A Theory of Deeds” Threatens the Russian State

Posted on February 3, 2013 by

Could helping your neighbor deem you an enemy of the state? The Duma, Russia’s legislature, is leaning that way by trying to regulate what de Tocqueville admired in early America: the “innumerable multitude of small undertakings” that constitute community, what … Continue reading →

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Hemlines, Symphonies, and Nuclear Weapons

Posted on July 18, 2012 by

The New York Times’ recent article about rising North Korean hemlines and the speculation they raised about changes in the country’s leadership under Kim Jong-Un was a journalist’s device for exploring the opaque nature of a hermetic and paranoid country. … Continue reading →

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History as a Presence

Posted on February 10, 2012 by

While living and working in Memphis, Tennessee, I moonlighted as a book reviewer for the local broadsheet, the Commercial Appeal. In retrospect I’m amazed I was able to do it, now in a time when The Washington Post no longer … Continue reading →

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