Last April, I began a serialzed weekly reading of my 2006 novel "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which Gene Wolfe called "a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read."
Next Tuesday, I'm helping Ed Snowden launch the young readers' version of his spectacular memoir "Permanent Record." Join us for a livestream event with Copperfield Books on Feb 9 at 19h Pacific.
"Serious" figures on the right say that presence of an open Qanon conspiracist in the GOP Congressional caucus represents a crossroads for Republicans: does the party support reality-based policies, or will it surrender to unhinged conspiracies?
Says @JohnQuiggin: the right surrendered a generation ago, when it embraced climate change denial: "all the governments in the world, backed up by every major scientific institution, were advancing a fraudulent theory of global warming."
This position wasn't merely something party bosses threw at low-information voters, either: the intellectual, libertarian wing of the party, like Cato's Pat Michaels, advanced an explicit, conspiratorial account of the climate emergency.
Back in January, I got a very odd call from an FBI Special Agent, who wanted to discuss a blog post I'd written summarizing a Popular Mechanics article on the physics of monument toppling, having received a complaint about it.
Thankfully, I have access to some of the very best civil liberties lawyers in the nation, namely my colleagues at @EFF. Andrew Mackey, an EFF lawyer who specializes in this kind of thing, had a talk with the agent, who agreed that I'd broken no laws and dropped the matter.
2/
Aaron did one better. He helped me draft a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI along with a demand that my record there be expunged, as is my right under settled precedent.
Next Tuesday, I'm helping Ed Snowden launch the young readers' version of his spectacular memoir "Permanent Record." Join us for a livestream event with Copperfield Books on Feb 9 at 19h Pacific.