Nancy Scola

Charlie Sheen is deserving of our attention. Okay, not the actor, exactly, but the nuances of his latest bout of woe. As the good folks at TMZ report, Warner Bros. has finally booted Sheen from “Two and a Half Men” for a litany of offenses, but in particular for ultimately breaking a provision in his […]

Let it be said that the gentlelady from Tennessee has a decent point here: Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) decried the failure of her own party to create a national agenda for technology policy during remarks at the State of the Net conference in Washington on Tuesday. “We haven’t laid out a vision for technology policy,” […]

First, a caveat: The American Prospect‘s strength, in my opinion, is as a cumulative force. TAP is a place where a diversity of voices can debate the political process, geek out on public policy, and indulge in the notion that the world is a complex place worth understanding. That makes plucking out a single piece […]

To piggyback on Jamelle‘s argument that the more bombastic conservative arguments that we’re hearing against net neutrality are symptomatic of a reflexive anti-liberalism, it’s worth keeping in mind that the historical record of communications debates in particular in this country made it fairly easy to predict that this is how this policy debate would shape […]

On Saturday, the Senate finally passed the Local Community Radio Act, a bill I’d written about here. (The House has passed it before, and passed it again on Friday.) This is a tweak to communications law in the U.S. that’s been ten years in coming, since big broadcasters pushed the Radio Broadcasting Preservation Act through […]

To second what Monica said below about what seems to be Federal Communication Commission chair Julius Genachowski‘s intention to adopt an approach to net neutrality that exempts wireless Internet connections: She’s absolutely right that that the exemption is extra worrisome when it comes to communities where smartphones are how people access the Internet, which in […]

Whenever somebody uses the phrase “cyber war” to talk about a pair of Russian teenagers unleashing a computer worm on the world just to prove that they can do it, much clapping abounds at both the National Security Agency and defense contractors’ offices, reminds Seymour Hersh: Cyber security is a major growth industry, and warnings […]