On March 29, 2008, the world celebrated its second annual Earth Hour, an epic sixty minutes of energy-saving, organized to draw attention to “The Greatest Threat Our Planet Has Ever Faced” – global warming, of course. A number of cities across the globe agreed simultaneously to shut off power together for a period of one [...]

For the past year, Brown University has been hard at work on a number of well-intentioned but misguided efforts to improve the safety of its students. I will discuss three of these efforts in this article: first, a siren, and second, a text-messaging system, both intended to counter school shootings; and, third, a campaign [...]

In “Gun-Free Zones: The Latest in Suicide Pacts” (Spectator VI:3), Kristina Kelleher ’09 noted that the Virginia Tech, Columbine, Beach, Jonesboro, Paducah, Connetquot High, Killeexn, Orange Park, SuccessTech, and West Nickel Mines school shootings all took place in so-called “gun-free zones.” This argument would, most unfortunately, presage another horrendous act of campus violence: the February [...]

What does Brown have against the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC)? The program faced heavy student and faculty opposition during the Vietnam War, producing its last graduate in 1972. It remains barred from access to the University, allegedly because of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy, established under President Bill Clinton, that restricts openly [...]

A great deal of attention has been paid to sexual assault problems over this past month. In an editorial published in the Brown Daily Herald on October 11th, Lily Shield ’09 writes, “For a school of our size and with our money, Brown has an appalling lack of resources dedicated to helping sexual assault survivors.” [...]

While the exact foundation for a “right to privacy” in America is somewhat constitutionally dubious – there is no such explicit right, as it has been “inferred” from the “penumbra” of various Bill-of-Rights amendments – it is quite clear that Americans highly value their privacy. This is in stark contrast to the UK, where recent [...]

Mr. Stern, for all of his admirable bravado, apparently fails to read my original article. Mr. Stern is free, as he does, to contest the arguments in Swindle. This, however, entirely misses my point. My thesis, as I made clear many times throughout my article, is that arguments that global warming is caused by CO2 [...]

The Great Global Warming Swindle is a new documentary from British television producer Martin Durkin, which casts aside environmental taboos and challenges the notion of “Global Warming” as a man-produced phenomenon.
Before I begin addressing the film’s arguments, I would like to discuss why such a film is so important. Whether or not one [...]

On September 12th, 2006, Harvard College announced that its early admission program would be coming to an end. Shortly thereafter, Princeton’s trustees (who happened to be meeting that weekend) decided to follow suit. As they describe (see http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/web_exclusives/plus/plus_101106rapelye. html), they assumed that following in Harvard’s footsteps immediately would make them appear on the top of [...]

As the author of a New York Times article revealing the existence of President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program (“Bush Lets US Spy on Callers Without Courts,” 12/16/2005), James Risen has been a controversial figure in the media: some call him a hero, and others believe that he should be locked away in Guantanamo. On November [...]