Philip Roth has been firmly ensconced in America’s literary pantheon for over fifty years. In her new book, Roth Unbound: The Writer and His Books, New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us an excellent survey of Roth’s life and work. Read my review here.
Snowden, ‘Animal Farm’ and the End of Privacy | Nov 14, 2013
Over the past few months, millions of Americans have discovered that their government is willing and able to spy on them as well as on the populations of other countries. This comes as a surprise to many.
For the nearly 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the majority of Americans have enjoyed strong legal supports of our civil liberties. We have lived with Constitutional amendments and legal requirements for due process designed to bar or at least curtail undue search, seizure, surveillance and other intrusions on our persons, property and privacy. These rights were perceived as congruent with our most basic tenet, that we are all equal, that no one has the right to intercept our emails, or invade our privacy other than with a legally obtained warrant, obtainable only after establishing probable cause. Many of us had come to believe that these protections were ironclad and non-negotiable.
But at some point unnoticed, or simply obscured by the fog of over a dozen years of the War on Terror, the rules changed. Our confidence that we enjoy inalienable rights to privacy is evaporating. Although every once and a while we are made aware of secret executive orders, directives and programs that delimit our civil liberties, it’s still unclear how we lost so much so fast. Continue reading “Snowden, ‘Animal Farm’ and the End of Privacy | Nov 14, 2013”