We cov­ered the Sec­ond Amend­ment a cou­ple of weeks ago. (Does it con­fer the right to bear arms?) So why not touch on the First Amend­ment this week and point you to an engag­ing inter­view (MP3 — iTunes — Feed) with the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author Antho­ny Lewis, who has just released the new book: Free­dom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biog­ra­phy of the First Amend­ment.

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On the lighter side .…

Yes­ter­day, I got a chance to attend Lar­ry Lessig’s last lec­ture ever on “Free Cul­ture.” (More on Lessig here.) It was a pre­sen­ta­tion wor­thy of Steve Jobs, and I’ll have more to say about it lat­er.

For now, I’ll leave you with an exam­ple of cre­ative “remix­ing” cit­ed dur­ing his talk. It’s polit­i­cal satire. Not the kind that your father grew up with. But the kind that’s grown out of the new dig­i­tal land­scape.

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The Nature Con­ser­van­cy asked its staff and lead­ing envi­ron­ment blog­gers how you can make “per­son­al, sci­ence-based choic­es to help save the plan­et.” Here are their 14 sug­ges­tions.

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You need to give it a minute:

via The Dai­ly Dish

The cel­e­bra­tion of Mar­tin Luther King’s birth­day was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent this year. It had a polit­i­cal edge to it, and unavoid­ably so. Dr. King’s work made pos­si­ble what we’re final­ly see­ing today — a black can­di­date mak­ing a seri­ous run at the Amer­i­can pres­i­den­cy. So it seemed entire­ly appro­pri­ate that Barack Oba­ma spoke Sun­day before the con­gre­ga­tion at Ebenez­er Bap­tist Church in Atlanta, where MLK preached long ago. In this 34-minute speech, you get a per­fect reminder of King’s lega­cy and also a stump speech deliv­ered in an ora­tor­i­cal style that King would appre­ci­ate. The video clip below has been viewed close to 450,000 times on YouTube. It’s also been added to our YouTube playlist.

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