BLOG | Politics & Law
Nostalgia has always informed the new, but never quite like this
We may be hitting the nostalgia apex with Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, and it feels like something’s about to break.
The Rockin’ Rock Reckoning
Emo music is having a renaissance, and it’s making former emo dudes like me realize emo dudes weren’t always the good guys.
Why America Will Never Have a Third Party
Many people clamor for an alternative to the two major parties. “I’m so fed up with both parties,” they say. “What’s the difference between Coke and Pepsi?” Here’s why they’ll never get what they want.
What the Email Privacy Act Means For You
On Wednesday, April 27, 2016, the US House of Representatives passed the Email Privacy Act by a vote of 419-0 in a burst of bipartisanship rarely seen in Congress. The bill now must pass through the Senate and receive a signature from President Obama before it becomes...
Yes, the Civil War Was About Slavery
Yes, the Civil War Was About Slavery by MATT STOKES | JULY 30, 2015 Historians like to emphasize the importance of reading back into history without the perspective of knowing how things turn out; in other words, when you think about an event like the...
Mississippi Wants to “Protect” Its Slaveholding Tradition
Mississippi is the nation’s poorest, fattest, and least-healthy state, and it’s bottom-two in education and infant mortality. But it wasn’t always so, my friends, it wasn’t always so. In the antebellum South, the city of Natchez was home to half of the millionaires in the United States. The state was one of the richest in the country, and, as time went on, the center of the massive (and massively wealthy) slave economy shifted from Virginia to Mississippi, the cotton explosion of the area enriching the burgeoning planter oligarchy of the Deep South.
‘Female’ is an adjective, not a noun.
The language we use matters, even if we don’t think it does.
Review: PBS’s Frontline presents ‘United States of Secrets’
The history of the NSA's spying on ordinary Americans is given detailed and weighty treatment in a two-part series, United States of Secrets, produced by PBS's acclaimed documentary program Frontline. Part one--which aired this week (and is available for free at...
Supreme Court Hears Important Tech Cases
The United States Supreme Court will rule later this year on two different issues that could have serious consequences on how we use technology in our daily lives. One could impact the way we consume TV over the internet and the future of cloud computing; the other...
SCOTUS McCutcheon Ruling: An Explainer
SCOTUS McCutcheon Ruling: An Explainer by MATT STOKES | APRIL 3, 2014 You’ve probably seen or heard about yesterday’s US Supreme Court ruling on campaign financing on TV or the newspaper. But we at Redmann Law have found that the news media doesn’t do a...
Thinking About Where We Get Our Meat
Nicholas Kristof wrote a column for the New York Times this week about the current state of America’s meat industry, describing the handful of giant companies that control the vast majority of our meat supplies as an oligopoly. Kristof raises numerous concerns about the way beef, pork, and poultry are produced. He points out that the “farm-raised” animals that supply the meat are kept in disgusting, unhygienic, and downright torturous conditions. Chickens, he points out, are bred to grow especially abnormally: “Poultry Science journal has calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as modern chickens, a human by the age of two months would weigh 660 pounds.”
Empathizing With Gun Lovers
This is not an argument for anything. By writing this, please understand that I’m not advocating for any gun policy or for any sentiment for or against guns. This is a thought experiment. First, I’ll disclose how I personally feel: I don’t own a gun, and I don’t plan on ever owning a gun. I don’t like guns, and I don’t like that people feel like they need to own guns. But I also understand that the way I feel comes from the way I grew up and the way I see the world, which is that I think people are inherently good and that you’ll generally be okay, no matter what. I never feel threatened and have never in my life felt threatened. I could, of course, actually have been threatened, but I never felt that way, and I’ve lived in some pretty dangerous cities. And since I’ve never felt in danger, I’ve never felt inspired to arm myself for protection.