The Prog

In November 2014, Barack Obama took executive action on immigration, offering relief from deportation for some (though not all) undocumented immigrants. It was a step in the right direction that will help millions of people, although many had hoped for more. Of course, many had also hoped for less—conservatives derided the plan, and even called it an unconstitutional abuse of power.

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.