Tag: free speech

Updating Homer for Sensitive Modern Readers: A Tongue-in-Cheek Proposal

As we reflect on the importance of this work in ensuring that Homer remains appropriate and enjoyable for future readers, we can surely agree that it is fully worth it.

Spaces for Speech on Today’s College Campus

Reviving campus newspapers and radio stations and student-led clubs, and putting resources behind them, could create more space for speech, help foster campus community, and model a level of comfort with differing views. The classroom may still need adjustment, but antagonistic wrangling with, or under the gaze of, professors is not the path to enlightenment.

Speaking Freely in Times of Crisis: A Conversation with Paul Kemeny,...

Examining, with Paul Kemeny, Richard Gamble, and Ben Faber, fraught moments in history where questions about communication and censorship, politics and propaganda, freedom and government intervention came to a head. What might we learn from such moments?

A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom

Teaching Tolerance in a Time of Trump sounds like a short-course a firebrand professor might offer, though I mean it in a more comprehensive...

The Right to Lie

If you must lie, measure it against your own self-interest and make sure it is legal, and if at all possible try not to do it under oath.

Up Against the Wall

No one was barred from the conversation back when there was a conversation. No dispatch ever read, “Wingnut Henry David Thoreau today issued a manifesto from his compound near Walden Pond…”

Welcome to the Plutocracy

This will not last. Greed consumes everything, until it finally consumes itself.

Stopping a Streetcar with an Umbrella

It is autumn in Amsterdam and damp. The twilight is coming. I await a streetcar to take me home through the labored-over canals, the...

The Front Porch Agenda?

With all the talk about "what is to be done," in terms of a decentralizing political agenda, I thought I'd throw some ideas out...