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I visited San Francisco today to celebrate the life of street musician Larry Hunt, also known as the “Bucket Man.” I met Larry in the mid-90s when I was a student at Cal. In those days he frequented Sproul Plaza — with a real drum kit if the weather was good, and with a set of buckets when the weather was bad. I was in a pretty awful headspace on the regular back then, but sitting and listening to Larry play and sing always put a smile on my face, and upbeat music in my head. (I was especially fond of his wacky mashup of “Wipeout” and the Batman theme song.) That Larry had amazing talent was obvious to anyone who passed by, but if you got to know the man — and I am glad that I did — you discovered that he had limitless heart. That was what drove him, really: His heart’s chief desire was …

It was eight years ago today that we lost Aaron Swartz, an exceptionally gifted hacker (in the original sense of the word), writer, and activist — a 21st Century renaissance man and a prodigy as well, much loved by people like me who spend our working hours pushing bits around. Aaron was confronted with the very real prospect of spending decades in federal prison for the “crime” of downloading too many academic journals, and ultimately decided, from within the fog of depression, that he could not live in this world any longer.

In the bubble I live in, a lot of people refuse to admit that the Obama administration did some truly heinous things. Hounding Aaron to suicide was one of them. When we remember Aaron, we are reminded that copyright laws in this country are badly out of whack, that our criminal justice system focuses on procedure, not justice, and that our society still does more …