One day after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal attack on Gawker Media to the New York Times, Gawker reporter Ashley Feinberg published a lengthy investigation that sought to solve the enduring mystery of Donald Trump’s infamous mane, which she described as a “cotton candy…
Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire who has waged a secret, decade-long, multi-front legal battle against Gawker Media, has somewhat counterintuitively positioned himself as a guardian of free speech principles. But in response to Gawker’s critical coverage of the technology sector—coverage that…
You may have heard about the latest dustup between Jeff Jarvis, a media futurist and journalism professor, and his satirical online alter-ego, @ProfJeffJarvis, who was created several years ago by a software developer named Rurik Bradbury to mock the jargon-laden prognostications for which Jarvis and his ilk are…
When Toni Morrison’s Beloved was published, in 1987, Margaret Atwood, writing in the New York Times Book Review called it a “triumph.” She wrote of the novel, which has come to be considered one of the most important of the contemporary era, “[Morrison’s prose is] by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical,…
Louise Mensch, an English author of popular fiction and unpopular political columns, as well as, for a few years, a Conservative member of Parliament, will start a new website, called “Heat Street,” for News Corp, Buzzfeed reports.
You may remember State Rep. Mike Pitts of South Carolina from his defeated efforts to keep the Confederate flag flying at the South Carolina State House last year. The intense media scrutiny of those efforts seem to have inspired a fairly cowardly response: According to the text of a bill he verbally introduced at the…
College newspaper controversies. Is there anything more amusing? I’ll tell you a secret: there is not. Oh, we have a good one today.
A Connecticut man has won his lawsuit against a shitty New York municipality that fined him for speeding, then arrested him because it didn’t like what he wrote on his ticket.
America has more or less made peace with Tyler, the Creator, the leader of the (now disbanded) shock-rap crew Odd Future. After a period of inciting controversy with violent lyrics and aggressive teenaged snottiness, Tyler has settled into life as a touring artist with a reliable fanbase. The United Kingdom, though,…
An art show at Westfield High School in Westfield, N.J. asked students to create images that commented on one of three hot-button issues: “Modern Technology Advances,” “Gender Equality,” and “Law Enforcement - Police Brutality.” That last option got a few local parents really riled up.
Wikipedia's entry on Muhammad was first published on November 8, 2001. It was eleven sentences long. Over the next few years, several thousand new words were added and edited, but it wasn't until 2005 that an image of Muhammad was attached: A 16th-century painting depicting the Islamic prophet. Two hours later, the…
Both boys' and girls' varsity basketball teams from a Northern California high school were disinvited from a tournament because of concerns that players would wear "I Can't Breathe" t-shirts during warm-ups, the Associated Press reports.
Another week, another ultimately meaningless free speech controversy on an American college campus. Should Ayaan Hirsi Ali be allowed to speak at Yale? If only there were some simple way of settling these nonstop arguments.
There are those who routinely overshare on Facebook, and then there is Anthony Elonis.
Rep. Jackie Speier has announced that she's going to introduce a bill criminalizing "revenge porn" into the House of Representatives next month. If and when she does, it will be the first effort to enact a federal law against revenge porn, or as others put it, "non-consensual pornography."
A Florida appeals court has sided with Gawker, finding that a lower court judge's order commanding us to take down a post and accompanying video describing the experience of watching Hulk Hogan fuck his friend's wife violated the First Amendment.
If we've said it once, we've said it a million times: Don't call the president of Zambia a potato if you're not willing to do the time.
Peter Beinart, in the Daily Beast, denounces the college "totalitarians" at Brown who sent riot cops to tackle New York police commissioner Ray Kelly, zip-cuff him, and lock him up for days to prevent him from speaking. Oh, wait, no, the kids just yelled at him.
Polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, useful in practice mainly because the mere idea of a lie detector test can scare people into telling the truth. This is underscored by the wide variety and seeming effectiveness of anti-polygraph "countermeasures," which can help anyone pass regardless of truthfulness. Now Feds…
In the case of Joseph Corlett vs. Oakland University, a judge has finally ruled: no, telling your college professor in writing that she is "stacked" and gives you a boner is not speech legally protected by the First Amendment.
