Remember the debate about waterboarding?  It developed when, during the Bush administration’s prosecution of the “war on terror,” news accounts revealed that certain terrorist suspects had been subjected to that “enhanced interrogation” technique so as to elicit information about planned future attacks. The argument in favor of the technique had two main points.  The first […]

            When I wrote this column thirteen years ago, my parents had just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.  They proceeded to celebrate six more before my father died, at the age of 91.  To commemorate the 35th anniversary that my wife and I celebrated last month, here’s the original column, slightly revised, and dedicated to […]

Those who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -Benjamin Franklin George Orwell only guessed at the means, but he had the result pretty clearly identified.  In “1984,” his futuristic tale of a land where Big Brother knows everything, privacy is virtually non-existent, as the government has […]

As an academic institution, Oberlin College in Ohio (not far from Cleveland) is probably not a typical undergraduate school.  Well-regarded academically, it has a history of iconoclasm and non-conformity.  Its students are drawn to the school in part because of the freedom of thought and expression that the culture of the place seems to honor. […]