Category Archives: Readings

The headline to the first article in this Post series seems ill-chosen. Entitled In the Bible Belt, Acceptance Is Hard-Won, the article describes a Kansas Oklahoma that is still very much in Toto's Kansas — one in which acceptance for a gay teenager is in fairly short supply, and the threat of violence in school is all too real.

There's bigotry here. Some of it is well-meaning — Michael Shackelford's mother fears

that Michael's eternal life was at stake. Janice feared that Michael would go to hell and be apart from her in the afterlife. “I'm afraid I won't see him again,” she says, her voice breaking.

But some of the bigotry is not at all well-meaning, and it drives Michael Shackelford out of high school in his sophomore year.

Looks to be a great series.

[Update: sorry about that…I let my Toto's Kansas metaphor run away with me there…]

Romenesko points to an LA Times piece arguing that when it comes to editorial cartoons, editors prefer mush:

Week in, week out, editors at these publications, and at many others across the country, fill space with our lamest throwaway stuff. This has gone on so long that an entire generation of readers and, sadly, editors, seem to regard editorial cartoons as just another infotainment medium, something to break up the gray type and give a comforting chuckle. If the cartoon mentions sex, sports or celebrities, so much the better.

The article argues that editors are just scared of angering readers, so they pass on [update: 'pass on' in the sense of 'decline,' not in the sense of 'forward'] the hard-hitting stuff such as this.

I've occasionally mentioned the often admirable John Young, noting his 'encrypted neo-Joycean prose style'.

Well, Seth Finkelstein has been kind enough to offer a translation of one of John's only moderately encrypted missives.

By The Power of Stipulation: I Have The Power!: Belle Warring at Crooked Timber's demolition of the TABNY scenario is much more enthusiastic than mine.

I am sick and tired of hearing about that ticking nuclear bomb in Manhattan. You know the one. Why? Because, if you let me put my thumb on the utilitarian scales, I can get you to agree that you have an affirmative moral duty to torture a three-year-old child to death.

I will utilitze my mighty powers of stipulation, thusly: the earth is invaded by a race of super-intelligent, but malevolent beings.

Go read the rest.

James Grimmelmann has an interesting pointer to an article purporting to describe the difference between how computer scientists and lawyers think. The core of the article is that legal data has “color”, or provenance.

It's a fun essay, but as someone who often straddles this divide, I think it's missing something important. But darned if I can put my finger on what it is. Maybe that law is often about shades of gray, when computer logic is binary?

It's good to be reminded that it's not just academe where the way that things work are capable of driving you bonkers. Dave Farber, who runs a very widely read IP mailing list, had some troubles with his IBM laptop. Contacting customer support produced nothing helpful, so he wrote about his experience. That produced this reply from an anonymous IBM executive:

I thought you might enjoy knowing that the IP thread about IBM support has already climbed two levels up the IBM management chain from me, and then leapt from there into a similarly rarified level in the PC division. Since this is IBM, one of three things will happen: either it will be completely ignored, or we will start an ad campaign about how good our customer support is, or it will be the straw that breaks some particular camel's back, heads will roll, and everything will get better in a year or two.

Sounds like here, only with more layers.