Global Crisis

Nissan today announced pricing for the 2015 Sentra, which is on sale now at Nissan dealers nationwide. The highly successful seventh-generation Sentra, introduced in fall 2012, continues to be refined for the 2015 model year with a number of interior comfort and convenience enhancements...

 Me & my MINI-E in 2009, my ActiveE in 2012 and my i3 in 2014. Five and a half years and over 157,000 electric miles (252,000 km), mostly powered by solar-generated electricity. It's been a little over five years since my electric journey began. I couldn't have possibly...

I have written 283 blog posts this year (so far!). Last December, I went on an official 6-week hiatus in order to finish my book, then came back on 2/12 in order to talk about the consequences of debating truth-claims about abuse in public.In 2013, my highest monthly viewership was about 17,000. In 2014, I had 4000 in February, 40000 in March, 17000...

There are two narratives about the police that I've been hearing a lot lately.One is that police "all the time" get killed by their own service weapon. That means that "he reached for my gun," or even worse, "I thought he might be reaching for my gun," merits instant force. We saw that in the Michael Brown case, in which Wilson claimed that Brown was...

Picture by @deray on Twitter. Used with permission."I have a mental illness. Am I next"Today news broke that the Milwaukee Country D.A. will not be charging a police officer who killed Dontre Hamilton. Hamilton was black, unarmed, and had psychiatric disabilities.Hamilton was...

Last March, a terrible story made its way through my social media feeds. A woman with Down syndrome had been raped. Her rapist was convicted. Then, a judge vacated the conviction because the woman "didn't act enough like a victim." I kept waiting for someone in the mainstream press to write a more nuanced piece than "this is horrible," because while...

Yesterday, Ismaaiyl Brinsley made an incendiary Instagram post, shot his girlfriend, traveled to NY area, killed two police officers, and then killed himself.The simple narrative is that this was about Garner and Brown.  Melissa McEwan and others would like us to keep all three victims in mind, and perhaps that complicates the narrative.In...

A few days ago over on my Facebook page I shared the story of the school district that took away a blind child's cane and replaced it with a "pool noodle." The cane technically belongs to the school district, and when the bus attendant reported that he was waving it in the air and...

The next generation Nissan Titan debuts at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit on Jan. 12, 2015....

Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education I have a profile of Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. I'm interested in his work as a public intellectual and defender of the traditions of liberal learning. There are lots of other people who make similar arguments (which is not a criticism. They are GOOD arguments!). But few have the kind...

We stopped at the Big Moose Deli in New York for some coffee. It's about ten miles from the Vermont border. Perhaps the most discussed topic of the BMW i3 is the implementation of the range extender for the North American market. In an effort to have the vehicle qualify for...

In Texarkana on Monday, a woman called 911 (click for the call) at around 2 AM to report a person in her garage. The woman was frightened and said that she heard banging on the windows from the person in the garage. A police office came to investigate, and found an African-American...

I had a new piece at the Chronicle yesterday about offensive speech and academic freedom. Deborah O'Connor, a Florida State lecturer, resigned after saying some really nasty things on a public Facebook page. In my piece, I compare her speech to the un-hiring of Steven Salaita, a case on which I've written a lot over the last few months.Here's a passage...

Congress just passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013. You can read the text of the bill here. It's supposed to get departments to regularly report data on deaths in custody, which is badly needed (it's shocking how hard it is to get that data). In a public Facebook...