In December of 1775, the text of King George III’s October speech to parliament regarding rebellion in the American colonies arrived on this continent and was distributed among a people toying with idea of independence. Prior to this revelation, many citizens, members of Congress, and even Washington himself were not entirely sure that a new nation would or should be ...
Dear Caitlin Dewey: I have read some really dumb, cloying, and earnestly written ideological gibberish in the past three years, but you have reset the bar with your recent love letter to online piracy. To be clear, I am confident that piracy itself is a serious problem for both culture and the economy, but this particular disease is nothing compared ...
No matter who or what is behind the hack on Sony Pictures, it’s really bad. The lead theory, though it begs many questions, is that the North Korean government initiated the attack and subsequent mass data dump of sensitive information along with five unreleased feature films. The rationale I heard proposed this morning on NPR is that the attack might ...
I’m still stuck on the following dependent clause: “In a dramatic series of tweets,…” I can’t help it. That’s just funny. Because for me personally, the verb tweet will never quite convey the kind of gravity that begs for an adjective like dramatic. But that’s just my personal taste for what Roy Blount Jr. calls “sonicy” in discussing the correlation ...
When I think about Ferguson, I can’t help but think about the story of the Boston Massacre and how often history repeats itself. That incident, which was no massacre, led to the trial of the British soldiers who fired into the crowd and who faced hanging if found guilty. Of course, it wasn’t the soldiers themselves who were really on ...
