What is a police state, and have we become one? These questions are asked with higher frequency since young Edward Snowden blew a loud whistle on our government spying on our phone calls and e-mail. But there has long been a more prosaic, everyday quality to American over-policing that doesn’t require high-tech surveillance. The […]

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(Photo: AP via NPR) Living in a world that hosts a large population of bigoted, ignorant people can do strange things to you. For instance, I never thought for a minute that I would, at any point in my life, find myself writing an opinion piece on a Miss America pageant contest or its aftermath. […]

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(Source: Wikipedia) Schools today are little concerned with play, fun, or enjoyment. Whether it’s getting rid of recess or cutting back on art and music, the dominance of test-based accountability in U.S. schools is increasingly driving “non-tested” subjects—music, arts, gym, drama—out of the curriculum. And the effects are significant: often these subjects keep kids engaged […]

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(New “Mad Men” Sergey Brin and Larry Page | Source: Creative Commons) The British humorist Douglas Adams once summed up the trajectory of computers and the internet in four teleological sentences: “First, we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was […]

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  The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption, by journalist Kathryn Joyce, forces readers to question just whose needs are satisfied by adoption, driven as it is now by conservative Christians and a dangerous desire to do good. Joyce unpacks a multibillion-dollar transnational industry that is manufacturing orphans to satisfy the […]

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