Sunday, December 25th, 2011
GPS monitors can track your every movement. Brain scans can now see lies forming in your brain. And advancements in genetic engineering may soon allow parents to engineer what their children will look and be like.
These new technologies are “challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways,” says George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. “And what’s so striking is that none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we’re having today.”
Listen to this episode of Fresh Air, where Rosen, the co-editor of the Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, details how technological changes that were unimaginable at the time of the Founding Fathers are challenging our notions of things like personal vs. private space, freedom of speech and our own individual autonomy.
Posted in US GOV: Constitution Primer, USH: Constitution & Early Years, USH: Post AP Ideas | No Comments »
Sunday, November 13th, 2011
It’s a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.
At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.
The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
It’s a surprising contradiction. Is the confluence of these two movements a mere historical accident? Or are the two trends related?
Posted in USH: New Frontier & Great Society, USH: Post AP Ideas | No Comments »
Sunday, November 13th, 2011
As to whether America could build the dam today, Michael Hiltzik, its modern historian, says in his book “Colossus” that it probably could not. It was hard enough back then to overcome the rivalries of the seven states involved, but at least nobody gave a fig for the down-river rights of the south-western Indians, let alone the Mexicans, or the creatures whose habitats were eradicated when the river was dammed. Today a rampart of federal legislation, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act, would block the way.