The filmmaker Chris Milk gave a now-famous TED Talk titled How virtual reality can create the ultimate empathy machine. In this talk, he argues that “film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely foreign from our…

Last week the NSA’s bulk collection of American’s phone metadata was ruled illegal. In this latest development in the case ACLU v. Clapper, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the National Security Agency’s program of bulk data collection about U.S. citizens’ telephone calls was unauthorized under Section…