By Tracy Mitrano. The Swedish Foreign Minister's letter to The New York Times this week could have been written before the Snowden disclosures, but surely it is the product of them.  Spoken from a premise of Western individualism and democracy, it calls for International Internet Law in support of those principles.  His specific seven-point plan is worth repeating here:

• First, surveillance should be based on laws, and these must be adopted in a transparent manner through a democratic process. The implementation of these laws should be reviewed periodically to ensure that the expansion of surveillance capabilities due to technological advances is properly debated. Read more...

By Rosemarie Emanuele. I recall one professor from graduate school who would often say that when he told people that he taught Economics for a living, the listener often reacted by being appalled. “That was the WORST class I ever took” they would often tell him, leaving him in a position of explaining why the class was really useful and actually very cool. As a math professor, I often encounter the same reaction (and sometimes doubly so, when the person learns that I am not just a math professor but also an Economist.) I found myself thinking of this recently when I ran into a former student as I made my way across the campus. Read more...

By Matt Reed. The Boy is twelve, and growing at what seems like a rate of about an inch a week. He’s growing fast enough that despite what seems like a superhuman appetite, he’s nearly invisible from the side. He doesn’t know it yet, but I can attest from experience that you don’t get an email when your metabolism decides to change. It just happens, and you don’t realize it until some damage has been done. Read more...

By Ben Yagoda. For some time, I have been planning to write a Lingua Franca post on Somebody Said Something Stupid Syndrome. SSSSS (as I abbreviate it) begins when an individual writes or is recorded as saying something strikingly venal, inhumane, and/or dumb. The quote is then taken up and derided—in social media or blogs—by thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of other individuals. And then it spreads from there. More...

By Melonie Fullick. For some reason, in the last few months I’ve seen a number of articles and blog posts about the nature of “public intellectuals” – how to define the term, to whom it applies, and of course, the long-running series of “critiques” that discuss the failure of public intellectuals and what contributes to it. Maybe I’m just more attuned to the topic because I worked on the Public Intellectuals Project for a year. Or maybe it’s the fact that, uncomfortably, I started to hear the term being applied to me – and I had to ask myself why I wasn’t exactly happy about it. More...