Manal Alsharif was arrested for driving last month.

Saudi law forbids women this right. Manal, determined to have an impact, used social media to broadcast her act of civil disobedience. Saudi authorities quickly tracked her down and arrested her.

The Rosa Parks reference in President Obama's Arab...

Fact Check Politiku: Paul Revere's Letter to Jeremy Belknap Circa 1798 

Much has been made of the contrast between Obama's address to the Arab Nations two years ago and yesterday's address. That is -- the contrast between the speech made two years ago and the speech following Tahrir and Bin Laden.

Little has been made of a most subtle yet perhaps...

Originally posted on Susanna Speier's Blog

Christine O'Donnell's, I am not a witch ad, inspired me to purchase the witch wig that I returned, unopened, the day before Halloween.

I did not return the wig because I wasn't able to get a hold of the Delaware snow...

Thanks to Facebook's "likes," Twitter's hashtags and, of course, the call from Mom, I was not alone on 9/11/10. Thanks to my low tolerance for unity, I also managed to steer clear of a day riddled with iterations of redundant media coverage reiterating the now internalized attack of another kind:

So much has been written about this already that, unless your head's been in the sand for the last week, you probably don't need another 101 rundown, so here's a compendium of the smart stuff. Hopefully this can make a small contribution towards countering the myriad misconceptions now running rampant.

Not only is the Ground Zero Mosque controversy a misnomer in title -- the 51 Park Mosque and Community Center (formerly referred to as Cordoba House) is not actually visible from the actual Ground Zero site -- but it misses the mark in a far scarier way. It...

The July 5th submission pile-up of "Fireworks & Combat Trauma Politiku" --written by military vets with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder-- in response to my July 4th Shout Out-- made me feel like a US Postal Service employee on December 26th. Craig Newmark's and Lily Casura's superbly...

Fireworks & Combat Trauma Politiku

Craig Newmark's recent blogpost about National PTSD Awareness Day inspired me to draft a proposal for a series of Politiku workshops for U.S. Military Veterans dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder due to combat trauma. Craig referred me to Lily Casura, author of the...

April's 140 Characters Conference at New York's 92nd street Y ran the gamut. Organizer Jeff Pulver sourced more idealistic twitter users than pragmatists, but there were enough in-betweeners to keep conversations unpredictably entertaining.

Students of eighth grade technology teacher, George Haines, used Twitter to assume identities...

The celebratory Guinnisses many of us enjoyed on St. Patty's Day were green but not in the way that New Belgium --with their solar array, packaging hall made of beetle kill pine and Team Wonderbike-- is every day of the year.

The dayglo utopian landscape and Esperanto...

Earlier this week, Amy Anderson a high school friend I recently reconnected with through Facebook, posted Charlie Wilson's obituary on her Facebook wall. The retired Texas Democrat Congressman's heart gave out just four days before Valentine's Day.

Wilson, known as much for his womanizing as his controversial politics, was...

New York Social Media week attendees came from insomnified newsrooms, midtown ad agencies and ivory towered J-schools. Bloggers, PR consultants, aggregate founders and overcaffeinated entrepreneurs congregated in clusters.

Some attendees were local. Others made pilgrimages from as far as Spain to plug into this week-long hive of...

In 2010, the frequency of Politiku I post will be determined exclusively by the success and/or failure of my New Year's resolution to balance the number of unpaid writing projects with the number of paid writing project I take on.

The rush I get by hitting the "submit" button...

Shortly after my friend, Rachel Levy suggested I do an H1N1 Politiku, she began to blog about it herself.

Rachel's smart, fair, well researched analysis of the situation inspired me to attempt to corral a legion of literary inclined epidemiologists and academics to give their take on the...

Politiku is about politics. At least, ever since its launch last spring, my HuffPost Politiku column has been. Obama, The Supreme Court, Iran, Health Care and Obama again.

But I can't seem to stop blogging about Mad Men. Can't even manage to stop blogging about other people...

The Norwegian Nobel Committee's decision to grant Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has not gone over well with the Taliban, Hezbollah or with Jamaat-eI-Islami, the conservative religious party in Pakistan. Nor did the Committee's decision sit well with Hamas, who also expressed disagreement about the Norwegian Nobel Committee's unconventional...

Not at all surprising, when I sent out my Health Care Politiku submission query I was swamped with phenomenal submissions. The delay in posting, however, had less to do with the volume of submissions I had to parse, process, and select and more to do with the subject matter....

That relentless curiosity, courage and pyrotechnic brilliance driving the astronauts, engineers, rocket scientists, physicists and researchers who dedicate their careers to space exploration, is a limitless source of fascination and inspiration for me.

To honor the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11's moon landing, I sought out individuals involved with...