A friend’s dad is a hereditary member of the House of Lords. I stayed the night at his house not long after he had been re-elected after a period of absence. Out of politeness I asked to read his maiden speech. He began with some platitudes, echoing the comments of a few previous speakers and […]

  Before the trade embargo was lifted, a US government agency tried to infiltrate the Cuban hip-hop scene in an effort to stir political unrest. They met with the politically vocal group Los Aldeanos, promoting them with their own TV channel and distributing their music on the black market to avoid government censorship. Los Aldeanos later went

When I was eighteen a conviction took shape within in me. Fired by imagination, fueled by optimism, its strength and certainty were out of all proportion considering the evidence I had at my fingertips. Now five years later I have stumbled across research, conducted separately by a handful of deep thinkers scattered through history, which