King Henry VIII was the first Monarch to take legal action to control the press in pre-Enlightenment England. His methods were simple enough: he required all printers to pay licensing fees in order to be allowed to print anything. This concept became known as ‘prior restraint’: preventing the distribution of controversial materials before they are even […]
(Caution: italics ahead!): From the school playground to the presidential election, the art of a truly fine insult is a universally accepted cultural tradition with a long, inglorious history. The most effective insults use irony, metaphor and personification tropes – along with humor – as a way to attack their opponents’ character, and to frame […]
Recent studies confirm that a growing number of college students are losing empathy for their fellow human beings. In a world that clearly needs more compassion, this is a shocking trend. Studies conducted between 1979 and 2009 found that college students have less empathy toward their peers than previous generations. The findings come from the study, Changes […]
My first encounter with social media was probably listening to the car radio as a child while my parents drove around Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. These are some of my earliest memories. A few of the songs I can recall hearing during this time include A Hard Day’s Night by The Beatles, Stop In the […]
The second event which influenced my sense of identity was more technology-driven, and it came much later in my life. The transition from vinyl albums to compact discs was a difficult one for me, and it was at this time when I first realized that for better or worse, change was inevitable; there was no […]
The final innovation which profoundly affected my personal sense of identity was the advent of the Internet. By the time my wife and I broke down and bought our first PC in the early 90s, the World Wide Web was already a full-blown global phenomenon. The Internet opened up entirely new vistas of research and […]
For all human beings, the reality we experience on a daily basis is the product of our language. Language allows people in every culture to categorize and conceptualize reality, define it in rational terms, and ultimately, to help create it. More importantly, it enables people to communicate with each other about this physical realm we […]
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s heartbreaking 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail is a classic rhetorical response to social injustice and to those who seek to perpetuate injustice either by ignorance, complacency, or tacit approval. MLK eloquently calls out the clergymen in Alabama who condemned him as an “extremist” for his very reasonable and honorable – […]
When former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation about the dangers of the ‘military-industrial complex’ in his farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961, he knew what he was talking about. In that famous speech, Eisenhower challenged the American people to limit the undue influence of the military on our democratic society: “In the […]
Michele Leonhart’s days as head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency are numbered. Last week, members of the House Oversight Committee delivered a vote of “no confidence” in her leadership abilities. Leonhart’s tenure as chief administrator for the troubled agency has seen a litany of scandals, including – among others – the massacre of civilians […]
Jason Darensburg's Blog-o-rama 