“A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” That’s been attributed to more than one person, and it’s an excellent way to describe written documents that get approved by authorities who are more concerned about things other than the content of the documents themselves. In other words, documents produced by corporations and governments. […]
Writers are always teaching me, whether they know it or not. I’ve been editing and beta-reading manuscripts for a number of people this summer, and their words make me re-evaluate some ideas I held firmly for some time. And I keep coming to the same dilemma: at what point does trimming text and adhering to […]
Image via Flickr Creative Commons (Caleb Roenigk) Image via Wikimedia under by Creative Commons by Matt Buchanan. Originally posted to Flickr On the bus last week, I was standing behind someone typing on a tablet. She was using the on-screen touchpad keyboard. Not that I was spying or anything (honest!), I watched how she typed an […]
Guest post by award-winning, bestselling author Samreen Ahsan Our world is trending on controversial hashtags these days: be it #JeSuisCharlie, #PeshawarAttack or #IWillRideWithYou. We all have our own opinions and thoughts—but what exactly does “freedom of speech” mean? Is it having the right to express an opinion on something that you observe or read, […]
Creative Commons Every January, pundits put on their Janus masks to look back and forward at the same time and make predictions about the year to come. They try to give their words as much gravity as they can, but if we look at history, we see they’re somewhat less reliable than the weather. Some […]
Photo Credit: CanStockPhoto under creative commons licence Where is the line between the right to free expression and the responsibility to respect others? There’s a debate going on now about whether media outlets should republish the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo that enraged three men in France enough to kill 25 people at the magazine and […]
There is a world-wide, religious war going on right now, even though Western, democratic and governmental leaders don’t want to admit it. It’s not a war prosecuted by all Muslims, not by any stretch. But it is a war, a campaign against freedoms the West purports to stand for: freedom of thought, freedom of […]