In a letter to the Speaker of the House, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder signaled that the White House would no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. In doing so the president took a proactive step for the equal rights of gay men and women across this country. This […]
Northeastern University’s own Ilham Khuri Makdisi published the groundbreaking work The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 last April, less than a year before the international community rested its gaze on the rapid ideological revolution and protest movement that has swept the region in the last few months. Rereading Khuri-Makdisi’s work in […]
In the United States, one often sends so many text messages, accepts (or rejects) so many Facebook “friend requests,” and reads so many tweets that social media can feel banal. Whether at home, in class, at work, or in transit, North Americans are constantly connected. However, the boundaries of the Internet and communication are no […]
The cascade of pro-democracy protest across the Middle East presumably should not have caught the West off guard, but it did. The United States spends billions of dollars each year supporting Arab governments and on a vast intelligence service dedicated to better informing officials about on goings in the region. Regardless of the United States’ […]
Mohamed Bouazizi was a college graduate and yet at twenty-six years old he found himself selling fruit on the side of the street to support his mother, uncle and five siblings in their hometown of Sidi Bouzid. According to a report by the New York Times,[i] a municipal inspector, Faida Hamdy, seized Bouazizi’s goods because […]
As the violence in Iraq slips from western headlines and the coalition mission appears accomplished, there is a false sense of calm in this troubled country. An unanswered question of who controls the Northern city of Kirkuk has threatened to throw the most promising region of the country into war. To ethnic Kurds, the most […]
In a recent exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Bashar Al-Assad of Syria stated, “When there is divergence between your policy and the people’s beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.” He also said that despite the similarities between Syria, Egypt, and Tunisia, Syrians were different because they had […]
The comparison between sports and violence is far from a novel association. For hundreds of years under the Roman Empire violence was sport and sport was violence. Further, George Orwell wrote in a 1945 essay that sport is little more than “war minus the shooting.”[i] These comparisons can yield modern-day benefits for law enforcement and […]
Over the centuries content producers have searched for ways of protecting their wares. From engraving names on sculpture, to scribing them on art, to the 21st-century development of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, these methods have only gotten more complex. The overarching idea behind all of the aforementioned methods, however, is a legal term known […]
