Despite the cries of protest and the outrage, and despite the widespread banning of the magazine, the image of Boston marathon bomber Dzhoktar Tsarnaev now depicted on the latest issue of Rolling Stone does not “glorify” the photogenic bomber. Rather, the power of the image of Tsarnaev—wearing a designer t-shirt and looking every bit like […]

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The acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has a violent history in the American public imagination in which black men are routinely represented as the aggressor to justify white violence. From late 19th century lynchings in the name of “protecting” white womanhood and Emmett Till’s 1955 murder to […]

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In the 1970s and 1980s, mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers, having realized that electronic communications required encryption for the sake of privacy, started working on developing tools for providing just that. Academic research is public. At its best, it is open for inspection, perusal, sharing, distribution and modification. That means if research on privacy-enhancing cryptography […]

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Last week, I called out the fallacy underlying Slate’s two-part series on how to revive progressivism’s agenda (“What’s Left?” Part 1 and Part 2). Its authors proposed a menu of new goals for progressivism—everything from ending the war on drugs to improving public schools, and even closing the widening gap between the rich and poor. […]

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Like King Arthur and his Holy Grail, it is a dream of every politician to jump on that one issue everyone knows is idiotic but no one has the cojones to oppose. Like “Freedom Fries”—that brief magic moment when the House lived under an edict that any slice and deep-fried potato was banned from being […]

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