Rules of Civility

I was just a kid April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in my hometown. My family – mom, dad, my younger brother Robert, and my baby sister Monica – were in the dining room finishing dinner when I rushed in from the TV room to announce the news. Both my parents had grown up in the east, in Brooklyn, but they’d lived in the south long enough to know a thing or two about race relations, and were savvy enough about “the times” to understand King’s assassination would be a momentous event, that it might change everything.

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Congress Ponders Nerve Gas Solution to Gnat Problem

Prominent destinations on the Internet–including Google, Wikipedia, and Craigslist–went varying shades of “dark” Wednesday in a loosely coordinated effort to raise awareness of two bills currently making their way through the United States’ notorious “Do-Nothing Congress.” SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) are bills being considered in the House of Representatives and Senate (respectively) to address the contagion of copyright infringement apparently fostered by a free and open Internet.

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This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Arthur S. Brisbane has what one might think of as a pretty good job. He’s the Public Editor (or, what was once known as the “ombudsman”) at The New York Times. According to the job description posted on the Times’ website, the Public Editor “responds to complaints and comments from the public and monitors the paper’s journalistic practices.” That is, he gets to represent the public interest (my emphasis) in what goes into “the newspaper of record.” Fully independent of the paper’s owners and publishers, the job description goes on to note, “(h)is opinions and conclusions are his own.”

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The Best is Yet to Come

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. The dark decade of the two thousand aughts is now a full year in the rear-view mirror and for some, the time has never been better to move forward with a foot on the gas.

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