Jerrod A. Laber is a writer and non-profit program manager based in Arlington, Virginia.
The announcement of a new Washington-based foreign policy think tank that is being funded with seed money from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Charles Koch Institute caused a lot of people in D.C. to squint intensely at their phone and computer screens, wondering if they were
Jazz is intimately tied up with freedom. It has deep origins in African-American spirituals and other mixes of slave folk music and classical theories that came from Europe. Socially, like many artistic innovations, jazz was originally scorned and condemned by the mainstream for many reasons, the most prominent of which
Liberalism did not originate in the US, but we have certainly laid claim to one of the boldest attempts at upholding and exemplifying its tenets, even if only in aspiration. While “all men are created equal” in 1776 was a very radical statement of political theory, the US has always
In his 2010 acceptance lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa praised the civilizing power of fiction. As a result of storytelling, “civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. We would be worse than we are without