A man is being dragged along the cold concrete floor by his collar, out of his solitary cell in an Iranian prison. He is blindfolded. He looks wan and frazzled.
Currently, we may be in possession of something that resembles political capital; what will we do with it? Perhaps we will be able to cash out on body cameras for police officers; perhaps we aren’t rich enough for that right now. Regardless of what policy changes catch on or don’t, I think that we would be wise to pay particular attention to form.
Nearly every day a new app, invention, or scientific innovation that is supposed to change the world comes out. Almost always, they fail to change the world in any significant way.
When the Senate Intelligence Committee released portions of their report detailing extreme techniques used by the CIA in detention and interrogation, the similarities between the report and the findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment were immediately evident.
The Princeton University student body has remained alarmingly inactive on the subject of sexual assault. In HBO’s show The Newsroom, however, a student at a fictional version of Princeton suggests that technology could help break this silence.
For two weeks between the debate on divestment and the fervor of Ferguson Will Gansa took over Princeton’s campus. Who is Will Gansa you may ask yourself?
The current state of political discourse is hardly healthy. Partisanship is alive and well, thriving in our gridlocked Congress and the media outlets that seem to derive perverse pleasure from skewering the other side. When we wax poetic about the liberal ideal of free speech in an open discourse, is this what we really mean?
“I’m a girl. But I decided it was easier to be a guy.” I met her at a hair salon in Tehran, one summer when I was visiting family in Iran. She was a client of our family friend. But peculiarly enough, she walked in without a hijab.
“Thinking local” means being willing to put our bodies on the line to fight, not only against injustices that take place overseas, but also against injustices that take place in our own backyards. It means demanding representation not only the macro-political level, but also on the most basic, municipal level. It means remembering that the decision-making processes that effect our everyday lives should not be out of reach.
Ojore Lutalo was incarcerated for 28 years in New Jersey state prisons for activities related to his involvement with the Black Liberation Army, a black nationalist movement prominent in the 1970s. He spent 22 of those years in solitary confinement. Throughout his confinement, Mr. Lutalo maintained his convictions and anarchist ideology, and remains a political revolutionary and educator to this day. His story is remarkable and at times strains belief. It is presented here entirely in his own words, edited only for length and clarity.