Your Custom Text Here
I've got a new piece up at a great online magazine called The Ascender. It uses the story of my own trip up the mountain as a window onto the political and environmental concerns on Kilimanjaro. It also teaches you how to say "I'm cool as a banana" in Swahili.
You can check out the piece here: Mountain Strain.
As a bonus for actually looking at this blog, here's a fun video I made with some footage from the trip.
Last week the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza has out a long (loooooong) history of the NSA’s surveillance programs since 9/11. It’s a great primer for anyone who hasn’t followed the Snowden releases closely. For those same people, I want to add a little context and analysis, trying to pinpoint what’s new, what he missed, and what conclusions we can draw.
What’s New
In broad strokes, Obama’s drift on security issues is not news. He went from being a Senator opposed to the broadness and maleability of the Patriot Act to a President who fully leverages those qualities in defense of drone strikes and domestic surveillance. The novelty in Lizza’s piece comes from details of the time surrounding Obama’s inauguration, which show how abruptly that transformation occurred.
Three days into the government shutdown, some media outlets think they have finally caught the GOP in a sneaky reversal over the defunding plan. It's actually just the plan that Ted Cruz has been laying out in public since at least July.
The general gist of a collection of recent tweets and Op-Eds is this: Republicans wanted to shut the government down unless Obamacare was defunded, but now that the thing is actually shut down they're suddenly changing course and trying to place the blame on Democrats.
Read More
Bruce Schneier is a cryptographer, security researcher and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, which studies the intersection of society and the internet. Recently, he's taken on the apparently dangerous job of working with The Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald to sift through thousands of the Snowden documents. He's also an excellent interview, as this piece from the MIT Tech Review proves.
It's only a few questions, but Schneier explains complicated details of the NSA story clearly and succinctly. Plus he uses awesome metaphors.
On what it's like to have his longtime suspicions about the NSA confirmed:
" ...it’s like death. We all know how the story ends. But seeing the actual details, and seeing the actual programs, is very different than knowing it theoretically."
Read MoreIf there's one post-Einstein physicist who can claim to be the realm's philosopher-king, however, it's Richard Feynman. Feynman worked out of the legendary CalTech physics department for decades. He made important contributions to a list of subfields with name I'll never understand, and won a Nobel Prize in 1965 for his theory of quantum electrodynamics.
His work made him a physicist's physicist, but Feynman also had cultural appeal as a sage figure. A young professor who worked down the hall from him towards the end of Feynman's career wrote a book about it called Feynman's Rainbow with the subtitle "A Search for Beauty in Physics and Life."
Read More