Noteworthy reads from last week:
“The long, halting, unfinished fight to end racial profiling in America,” Emily Badger
“George W. Bush promised to end racial profiling a decade ago. Now Eric Holder is still trying”
“Who Should Own the Internet?,” Julian Assange
“Unlike intelligence agencies, which eavesdrop on international telecommunications lines, the commercial surveillance complex lures billions of human beings with the promise of “free services.” Their business model is the industrial destruction of privacy. And yet even the more strident critics of NSA surveillance do not appear to be calling for an end to Google and Facebook.”
“The evidence is in: there is no language instinct,” Vyvan Evans
“For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong.”
“Could religion survive contact with extraterrestrials?,” Damon Linker
“Such a discovery would seem to vindicate the evolutionary hypothesis that life can and does emerge from (seeming) nothingness all on its own, without divine intervention of any kind.”
“How Sociologists Made Themselves Irrelevant,” Orlando Patterson
“We need to reinvigorate public sociology…I’m talking about using our expertise to help develop public policies and alleviate social problems in contexts wherein the experience and data can, reciprocally, inform our work.”
“The Quiet German,” George Packer
“The astonishing rise of Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in the world.”
“Want to Limit the Use of Police Force? Limit the State,” Charles C.W. Cooke
“What, I wonder, would the anti-tax rebels who threw off the British Empire make of the news that a man had lost his life for peacefully selling a “loosie”? Once again: Is this why governments are instituted among men?”
“The Art of Revolution: Creativity and Euromaidan,” Natalia Moussienko
“Rationalism and pragmatism have their limits; emotive principles do not. Rationalism and pragmatism don’t lend themselves to the artistic mind; emotive principles do.”