Photo by Wendy Thigpen Holmes

Today is First Amendment Day at UNC. I’m in class with black tape across my mouth to show the importance of this amendment. This campus-wide, day-long event is designed to both celebrate the First Amendment and explore its role in the lives of Carolina students. Today students are reading from banned books, singing banned music and discussing the importance of each of the rights protected by the First Amendment. The Carolina Association of Black Journalists is staging a demonstration of the ways African Americans pushed back when they were denied First Amendment freedoms during the Civil Rights Movement in America. More about that after the jump. Remember to be tolerant when others exercise their rights.

Can you name all five freedoms mentioned in the First Amendment? (I always forget one) Get the answers after the jump!

NYTimes tech columnist David Pogue has been accused of a journalism no-no, engaging in conflicts of interest. Critics have ranged from his techy counterparts to even his paper’s public editor. Pogue is criticized for reviewing new products in his popular column and also writing books about some of them. The NYTPicker just blogged about a podcast Pogue was interviewed in Sunday when he admitted that his “Missing Manual” series might be a conflict of interest but that other tech writers were guilty of the same practice. What’s more is that Pogue chose to defend himself by saying he was “not a reporter.”