In the middle of New York City — literally, in the very middle of the 5 boroughs — there is a little island that most New Yorkers know nothing about.

Within a couple hundred yards of the skyscrapers of Wall Street — and a couple hundred feet from the docks of Red Hook, Brooklyn (where I live) — there are hundreds of acres of open grassland, picturesque tree-lined thoroughfares, rows of yellow clapboard mansions and Victorian brick townhomes, a 9-hole golf course and a half dozen baseball diamonds, a panopticon-style prison, and an 18th-century fort complete with a moat.

My father grew up here, on Governor’s Island, which was until the 1966 an active Army base (and a Coast Guard base until 1994). My grandfather, Lt. Col. John J. Fahey, was the Inspector General of the 1st Army, and he and his young family were stationed there in the mid and late 1950’s. My family has always spoken of Governor’s Island with a deep fondness — my grandmother especially would recall the ferry rides to Manhattan with my young father and uncle, and their visits to the big city from the idyllic quiet of their island home.

50 years later — last weekend — my father and uncle came to New York for an Army brats’ reunion visit to Governor’s Island, and we tagged along (and took lots of photos).
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When we evaluate movies, TV shows, and other media products that are intended to be seen by a large, mass audience, we often take two positions at the same time:

• What I really think of this
• What will Someone Else think of this?
  (where Someone Else is a social demographic
  different from your own)

We see this phenomenon in culture, in business, religion, in product/user interface design, and of course in politics, where we think that there are some ideas that are good for a more educated, sophisticated, and egalitarian elite, while those same ideas can be dangerous and misleading for the unwashed masses of Someone Elses out there. MORE…

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Is Iraq in a state of civil war?

When most Americans think of a civil war, we think of the Civil War. The American Civil War. We think of literally millions of soldiers marching against each other and dying by the thousands every day. We think of cities on fire, blockaded ports, and thousands of infantry charging into cannon fire.

The problem with this image is that the American Civil War is, historically, a pretty intense and bloody conflict as far as civil wars go. Many civil wars are much smaller and less bloody, and don’t involve armies, battlefields, and artillery shelling.

Over 550,000 Americans died in those four years of fighting. Wikipedia has a page on which you can compare the death counts of some of the bloodiest wars in human history, and it’s both eye-opening and sobering. Compared to the death counts of some contemporary civil wars around the globe (particularly in Africa), the American Civil War is comparably deadly. The Bosnian civil war in the early 90’s, for example, claimed 278,000 lives in only three years.

America’s defining internal struggle was no mere state of unrest. In fact, more Americans died in the Civil War than any other American conflict. When Americans think of “civil wars”, we think of the worst thing that ever happened to our nation. MORE…

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A slight change of focus…

(also check out Part 1 Part 2 and Part 3)

You may recall that a nefarious global spying program called “Total Information Awareness”, spearheaded by convicted Iran-Contra criminal Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, was exposed in 2002 by the New York Times.

After this program was made public, there was a great outcry by Senators, Congressmen, and pundits both from the left and the right. The consensus at the time was that the program, as conceived, was illegal and would require new legislation in order to become legal.

The Republican-led Congress decided they did not want to change our existing civil liberties legislation (except for what they passed in the Patriot Act), so in 2003 they banned the TIA program and Poindexter was let go. In fact, Congress even banned programs like TIA, specifying that they would not fund…

“…the program known either as Terrorism Information Awareness or Total Information Awareness, or any successor program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or any other Department or element of the Federal Government…”

Much of the new NSA program resembles Total Information Awareness, and many suspect they simply moved the program from the Defense department to the NSA, where Congress wouldn’t know about it.

It looks like the Bush Administration learned a valuable lesson: If you want something that Congress or existing laws won’t let you have, then just do it on your own and don’t tell anyone about it. MORE…

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I honestly don’t know which is worse.

(also check out Part 1 and Part 2)

The press and Bush’s supporters make a big deal out of the fact that the NSA’s phone records program does not actually involve wiretaps. I think that’s a red herring.

My argument is that the program is effectively a massive stakeout of every single American citizen. It’s the electronic equivalent of stationing a federal agent outside of every one of our homes, and having them follow us around all day, writing down every person we talk to, every business we interact with, and (in theory) everything we buy, everywhere we travel, and potentially much more.

So even if it’s not a wiretap, it’s still spying. Domestic spying. On you and me. MORE…

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(also check out Part 1)

Most people who say that they would give up their liberty for temporary safety justify their opinion by saying “innocent people have nothing to hide”.

But I wouldn’t be so sure. There are lots of ways a perfectly law-abiding American can get swept up by this program, both accidently and deliberately.

Think about Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Think about your social network on Friendster or MySpace and imagine how many clicks it would take to get from your profile to the profile of, say, a serial killer, a pedophile, or a terrorist sleeper agent. Probably not that many, really. MORE…

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The NSA phone records program doesn’t seem quite so bad, at least not when it’s described this way.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” - Sir Walter Scott

The NSA’s recently-revealed program to scour through and analyze the phone records of millions of normal and innocent Americans is apparently seen by my many of us to be perfectly okay. A Washington Post/ABC poll conducted on Friday, the day after the revelations, concluded the following:

The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.

I was shocked by this report. 63 percent? Do these people have any idea what it is they are approving of?

Maybe not. Let’s look at the actual question asked in the poll: MORE…

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I’m no architecture critic, but when I read the New York Times review of the just-reopened Morgan Library & Museum a few weeks ago (with words like “dazzling”, “mesmerizing”, and “triumph”) I knew I had to visit as soon as I could. So immediately following my class field trip the other day, I dismissed my students and walked a single a block up Madison Avenue to see what all the talk was about.

The Morgan Library has in the past been perceived as a second-tier New York museum, not quite at the level of the Metropolitan, MoMA, or Guggenheim. But from the moment you first walk into the new Morgan Libary, the entranceway and courtyard immediately make a strong, visceral case for moving the Morgan up into that exclusive pantheon of great New York institutions.

I could not take photographs within the galleries themselves, but maybe you can get a sense of the lobby’s bright energy from these images. It is a remarkably elegant and powerful space: despite the massive scale it succeeds in making the visitor feel welcome and unrushed. I was surprised by how intimate the experience was, both in the lobby and in the exhibition galleries. MORE…

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