Spirit Freed

The Exhausted West?

On Sunday, Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died at age 89. His more famous works include One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich and the Gulag Archipelago, which documented the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system using primary research material as well as Solzhenitsyn’s own experience from a Gulag camp. Indeed, Solzhenitsyn is most famous for his role as an outspoken critic ...

Change Congress

Stanford Law Professor and founder of the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, is starting a new movement aimed at reducing corruption in politics. Lessig's contention is that the fundamental obstacle preventing political change is not a misunderstanding or disagreement over policy, but instead a lack of transparency and, therefore, accountability. Because campaigns are ...

On Moral Courage

On the eve of the anniversary of the assassination of MLK Jr., I thought it would be appropriate to post a video here of one of King's less popular speeches. Less popular because it does not showcase his familiar vision of racial and spiritual harmony, but instead criticizes America as hegemonic, militaristic and arrogant. Less popular because it instead promulgates the idea that dissent is perhaps the most fundamental tenet of our democracy and because King tied together the damage caused by an...

‘I’ Before ‘We’ Except After ‘You’

By now, anybody and everybody not living on a remote planet is aware of what just happened in Iowa this past Thursday. In purely literal terms: Barack Obama won the Iowa Caucus. Barack Obama. What does that mean, exactly, aside from the literal meaning of it. Let's parse this for a second. Barack Obama. He is half black, his father is from Kenya, his mother from Kansas. He is a Junior Senator from Illinois. His father was a muslim and he lived a significant part of his life in Indonesia. No...