John Oliver

the Web Editors 6-06-2016

Screenshot via LastWeekTonight / Youtube.com

As part of a segment on the debt collection industry, John Oliver, host of LastWeek Tonight, bought up $15 million worth of individuals’ medical debt and forgave it all.

“It is pretty clear by now debt buying is a grimy business and badly needs more oversight,” Oliver said. “Because as it stands any idiot can get into it, and I can prove that to you, because I’m an idiot, and we started a debt buying company, and it was disturbingly easy.”

the Web Editors 8-04-2015

Screenshot of 'Last Week: Tonight'/YouTube

"Taxation Without Representation." It's the slogan on license plates in Washington, D.C., and a daily fact of life for residents in the nation's capital. With typical wit, comedian John Oliver this week spent a segment of his HBO show Last Week: Tonight on the only democracy in the world with a non-representative capital city, saying, "The Dalai Lama ... called it 'quite strange.' And it is not good when a guy from Tibet says, 'Wow, this system is really undemocratic.'"

WATCH the segment here.

Image via scyther5/shutterstock.com

Image via scyther5/shutterstock.com

In 1990, my father and pregnant mother packed up their life in suburban Illinois, bundled their four young children (including me) onto a plane, and landed in Romania to teach on a grant at the University of Bucharest.  

The country was in the throes of revolution following the execution of ousted dictator Nicolae CeauČ™escu, and the transfer of power was by no means tidy or complete. The Securitate — one of the most brutal secret police forces in the world — proved difficult to shut down. All our neighbors operated under the assumption that their every move continued to be watched (one friend had taken apart his typewriter by hand and hid it so he could answer honestly that he did not keep a typewriter in the house). Being American, my parents were told to expect our apartment to be bugged.

Freedom had come, but the systems of omnipresent control proved psychologically hard to shake.

The specter of surveillance is an insidious tool. In the 1790s, British philosoper Jeremy Bentham developed a centralized prison model called the panopticon, in which every occupant is visible to a single guard. Most models, since adapted by prisons and schools around the world, leave open the possibility that there is no supervisor watching after all. Whether there is isn't the point — the mere promise of one is enough to coerce significant behavior change. Being constantly observable is the trap.  

These days, Americans don’t need a formative year spent in post-soviet Romania to feel uneasy about omnipresent surveillance. Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive secret surveillance programs operating under the NSA, with enormous access to private data from citizens not suspected of terrorism or criminal wrongdoing, rocked our understandings of data privacy and civil liberty. Now, as then, it’s reasonable to worry that we’re being watched.

The Editors 7-16-2014

Comedian John Oliver on how economic inequality is killing the American dream