In her exhaustively researched new book, Larissa Tracy, an associate professor of medieval literature at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, says linking “medieval” with acts of torture is a fallacy.

“Torture was not a pervasive means of medieval judicial control, despite accounts of public brutality and secular punishment …,” Tracy wrote in the introduction to “Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature,” which cites the “Getting Medieval” scene from “Pulp Fiction” as a way of explaining how our understanding of the medieval era has been misguided.

Micah Sifry’s been out in front of the new developments in transparency and media for quite a while. His work with the Personal Democracy Forum and his writing at techPresident continue to chronicle the ways technology leads to major changes in American democracy.

Now Micah has written a fascinating book, Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency. Particularly timely as we watch both Bradley Manning’s prosecution and the immense changes in North Africa and the Middle East, Sifry not only talks about Manning, Assange and the release of both the Collateral Murder video and the state department cables – but tells the bigger story of old closed hierarchical systems being overtaken by open, lateral relationships.