(Brian Williams | Source: NBC News) The government shutdown is, in some ways, a really easy story to understand—if the press wants to report it that way. The Republican House passes a spending bill that would fund the federal government—and defund or delay certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The Senate, with its Democratic […]

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  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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