Salon.com > The Guardian

Adrian Lamo opens up about life after turning in Bradley Manning

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:20:00 +0000

The Guardian Thursday published a fascinating IM interview with Adrian Lamo, the hacker-turned-journalist and minister who famously turned Bradley Manning in to the Department of Defense after the young soldier confided in Lamo through online chats.

Lamo's elegant responses show a man attempting to detach himself from the realities of Manning's harsh detention and worrying legal prospects. They also show a man with enough philosophical soundness to reject questions about acting with hindsight.

Lamo told the Guardian's Ed Pilkington that he has not closely followed Manning's recent pretrial hearings:

It's not because I take it lightly, but because I take it as seriously as I do. Making the choice to interdict a man's freedom knowing it could mean his life, is something that's easy to judge but can only really be understood by living it. You either fold it into your character, come to terms and go on with your life, or you get stuck in that moment forever. For a while I thought I would be. I took it badly. But I came to terms and continued my life some time ago. It has, after all, been two years.

... I knew my actions might cost him his life. In that respect, any other outcome is preferable.

5 reasons global warming is more terrifying than you think

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:38:00 +0000

This week the sane among us will scoff at those hoarding candles and food for another apocalypse that fails to materialize. We’ll laugh at the accounts of people readying their bunkers and at store shelves being wiped clean. We know that the world will not come to a cataclysmic end on December 21.

Here’s what we’re not so good at understanding: We are part of a slowly enfolding tragedy in which the end of the world as we know it may be getting closer and closer. It won’t happen on any particular day that we can pinpoint and there won’t be a giant explosion or a big flood that will wipe everything away. There will be many floods and fires over many years. One species, one crop dying off after another.

Picasso scandalizes Scotland

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 23:30:00 +0000

A Scottish airport has backtracked on its decision to cover up a poster promoting an exhibition at the Scottish Museum of Modern Art that featured Picasso’s “Nude Woman In a Red Armchair” (1932).

Apparently, the abstracted nude’s bare breasts and vagina were too much for some passengers, and the airport made the temporary decision to place a white vinyl cover over the offending parts before it permanently removed the advertisement.

In an interview with AFP, director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, John Leighton, highlighted the lunacy of contemporary decency standards:

All kinds of images of women in various states of dress and undress can be used in contemporary advertising without comment … But somehow a painted nude by one of the world’s most famous artists is found to be disturbing and has to be removed.