Barack Obama during his initial campaign for president (the organization has continued under the name Progressive America Rising), and has also helped organize a series of cultural and educational activities in Austin through the New Journalism Project. After a long drought, Dreyer began writing again, with his work appearing on The Rag Blog and around the Internet. He is a contributing editor to the online Next Left Notes and in 2006 wrote a major cover story for The Texas Observer called "The Spies of Texas" featuring exclusive revelations about how the UT-Austin campus police tracked the lives of dissidents and iconoclasts in the Sixties. The Rag in the digital age John McMillian writes that "some of what's happening in the left-wing blogosphere can... be compared to the Sixties underground press," and Thorne Dreyer told the Austin Chronicle's Kevin Brass that "There are a lot of similarities in the two eras." Brass, indeed, sees The Rag Blog as "part of an effort to revive some of the rabble-rousing counterculture spirit of the Sixties." Yet, Kevin Brass writes, Dreyer and The Rag Blog are "working in a media landscape light-years removed from the offset printing presses of their youth. While the original Rag would be lucky to sell 15,000 copies on Austin street corners... on any given day, a Rag [blog] post might pingpong through the digital atmosphere, creating the type of traffic the kids of the Sixties couldn't imagine, not even with the right psychedelics." Dreyer, who has referred to recent changes in his personal life and his renewed commitment to social change and activist journalism as a "virtual rebirth," told Austin's public radio station, KUT-FM, that "our strength is in being together and realizing that we're not alone, and I think that's why the Internet has been very useful... in helping to uncover injustices and... in helping people feel like they're part of something larger." In a 2008 feature story in the Austin American-Statesman, Brad Buchholz wrote: "Thorne Dreyer's belief system for a new millennium is anchored in community and participation and a sense of humor. As a younger man, he led a charge to change the world, thinking it his generation's calling. Today, Dreyer has the gentle feeling at times that the movement has repaid the favor and saved him." References External links The Rag Blog Selected articles by Thorne Dreyer "The Spies of Texas: Newfound files detail how