I believe that it’s not able to accurately create a picture of someone’s coding ability, and it’s also not how problems get solved in the real world. Yet it’s become a staple of interviewing for a job in Silicon Valley. I’ve no statistics, but I would guess that these types…

Aaron Swartz’s words that I am re-posting here (Creative Commons license) could’ve been a sort of guiding compass during a very specific phase of my life, and I hope that future generations of internet-connected activists will continually return to them for inspiration. Here is the afterword to Homeland, a novel…

This piece was published in Volume Ten of Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal and earned myself the 2012 Sanderson Prize for “best essay” from the UMass Amherst English department. Of all the writers in the Western modernist canon, Henry Miller (1891–1980) will turn out to be one of singular…

This piece was first published on April 18, 2014 at The Huffington Post. The drama of Barrett Brown’s case and cancelled trial is all but over, but the media and the public has dropped the ball on what he was trying to expose. That’s the secretive world of private intelligence…

This piece was first published on September 15th, 2013 at VICE Motherboard and also appeared the next day at the Daily Dot. Could the intelligence community have a secret exploit for Bitcoin? It’s rather obvious that Bitcoin presents a very strong financial incentive to break its cryptography, since such a…

This piece was first published February 28, 2009 in UMass Media. In a controversial decision spurred on by the economic crisis, Brandeis University recently decided it will close its Rose Art Museum and sell its $300 million collection to help with its endowment. Meanwhile in Sweden, the operators of the…

This column was first published on March 11, 2009 in UMass Media. The Republican Party in the United States has lost all credibility. It is foolish for anyone to think that someone like Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal will save them in 2012. To an independent observer like myself, it’s…

This piece was first published November 25, 2008 in UMass Media. In his unconventional 15-year career, Conor Oberst’s songs have evolved from angsty and emotional expositions on adolescence to the serious existential and occasionally political ones he is known for writing today. Having followed him closely since 2000, when I…

This was first published January 24, 2010 in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Just before the weekend, Vampire Weekend’s (VW) “Contra” album hit #1 on the Billboard 200. In order to understand this achievement, we might require a cursory glance at their first effort — the self-titled Vampire Weekend album was…