Michael S. Roth— Over the last month, I’ve been talking with reporters, podcasters, and pundits about the quality of campus culture in the US today. I was surprised when one reporter asked, almost plaintively, “President Roth, are the kids alright?” He had been reading various reports of free speech crises,
Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman— We find much of what is said about free speech on college campuses unsatisfying. We are deeply troubled by the efforts to suppress and punish the expression of unpopular ideas. Those who call for punishment of speech that makes students feel uncomfortable fail to recognize
Why was the FCC created and what was its original purpose? Thomas Hazlett, former chief economist of the FCC, discusses the politics of the FCC and issues like censorship and net neutrality.
Books have always had the power to make authorities rather uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s because the novel makes the government look bad, goes against the teachings of a particular religion, or says things that are simply too salacious. In A Little History of Literature, John Sutherland takes a look at how
Janice Ross— “Ballerinas dance anti-Putin Swan Lake in Odessa.” The headline sounds like a set-up for a sketch comedy routine but it was deadly earnest. This past May, four Ukranian ballerinas donned tutus and pointe shoes and interlaced arms to dance the four little swans quartet from Swan Lake as
Every day hundreds of thousands of websites are created and the number of unique Internet users is up in the billions. Our collective addiction to Facebook and Google is such that the brands have now become action verbs. When you have questions, Google (almost) always has the answer. The nearly
Follow Forbidden Music on Facebook! From the Yale Books Blog: Michael Haas‘s Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis, to be published in North America in June, explores the legacy of those musicians persecuted by the Third Reich. When National Socialism arrived in Germany in 1933, Jews were dominating music more
As a messy election unfolds in Iran, details of the situation have been broadcast throughout the world not only by the mainstream news media, but also by Iranian citizens who are members of social networking sites such as Twitter. Iranian officials have tried to block the flow of information, first