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 […]

Read more

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 […]

Read more

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. […]

Read more

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 […]

Read more

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu warned that Iran is about to cross the nuclear red line and the U.S. had better do something about it. The election of Hassan Rowhani, a moderate president, is a game changer and likely means Iran will slow down its nuclear project. That’s good but not good enough for Israel’s […]

Read more