Death squads work under cover of darkness, kidnapping and killing, robbing people of their lives and inspiring terror among the people. Death panels have official sanction to take and ruin lives. They meet in government buildings with Orwellian agendas posted at the door. I had thought that the Senate committee crafting the new health care…

Society drives a portion of the truth about itself underground, and people create an alternate pathway for that truth as best they can. Both of those ideas are worth studying. How does a society like ours silence and drown out voices, stories, facts, understandings, truths? And how do people find a work-around, and with what…

A little theory about the weakness of our democracy. Silence is the basic mode of a citizen, largely unallied with others, having no regular civic audience, skilled in no form of public address, possessing no reliable stream of information or one so contested and poisoned and vexed as to be more problem than aid, susceptible…

Summary: The university’s Trustee governance structure works on a management model that doesn’t seek a lot of input from students, faculty, or the voting public.  For the first time I attended all the open or public* sessions of the Trustees of Indiana University over the two days of their June meeting, held this time on…

Hossein Derakhshan — @h0d3r –has just published an essay that is very specific about the nature of activism, free speech, hyperlinks, and blogging, and also about the stakes for all of us in the way the Web has evolved away from the openness we knew about a decade ago. Like other important pieces of writing,…

Facebook thinks NPR-affiliate WVPE hosts a spam website, I guess, so I have to ask you to click this link to read or hear the essay on Indiana’s walk of shame this spring. The text and audio are here–please click.

Progress continues The effort to make a writer’s Facebook postings also save (or update) to a WordPress blog is moving ahead. Dave Winer’s Little Facebook Editor is testing the concept, and this post was composed on the current version of that software. I like this approach a lot. Why should a writer contribute to a…

One of the great witnesses of the past century, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, explained in this way the importance of individual voices and traces of particular lives: Unless we can relate it to ourselves personally, history will always be more or less an abstraction and its content the clash of impersonal forces and ideas.…

If you had known her as a child, maybe you would have called her Louise as it says on her birth certificate. But I doubt Lou has let anyone call her Louise since Franklin Roosevelt was president. She is 92 now, retired for a quarter of a century. Before that, she was the kind of…

I’m reading early drafts of short essays written for an English class. They are fine and will grow in revision, so I’m not worried. But they bring to mind the contrast between school essays and the great tradition of the essay as a literary form. School essays show a teacher that a student was paying…