Edward Snowden and the Critique of Violence

In his 1921 essay "Critique of Violence" Walter Benjamin speculated that labor might challenge the state's monopoly on violence. Falguni … More

Technology and Microterrorism

It was hard not to feel a sense of ambivalence over the speedy yet unsettling way the Boston Marathon bombers … More

Last night’s Frontline documentary "Cheney’s Law" was a chronicle of horrors, to be sure, but there were no new revelations … More

Today Google Maps adds Chicago to its "Street View" function, so that urbanites’ activities in all their banality are memorialized … More

In a kind of "dog that didn’t bark in the night" investigation, Nation writer James K. Galbraith considers the curious … More

Last week there was talk that the next step in airport screening would be body cavity searches, but there seems … More

This morning, while driving my wife and son to O’Hare Airport, I heard Britain’s Home Secretary John Reid speak about … More

On my first weekend after I moved to Philadelphia, when I was still uncertain about my decision to move there, … More

Inspired by the resounding success and popularity of the NSA’s mass phone bugging operation, AG Alberto Gonzales and the FBI … More

Not that this is going to happen, but the other day a conservative Republican Congressman named Darrell Issa threw out … More