Category Archives: Readings

The Incredible Sinking Economist

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

In The Economist fails the Turing Test again, the estimable Henry Farrell pokes at the Economist’s gormless and unpersuasive attack on François Hollande. Here’s part of Henry’s takedown:

I’ve no idea what Hollande is going to be like (except that he’s certainly going to be disappointing). But I do know that this is one of the most exquisitely refined examples of globollocks that I’ve ever seen. It’s as beautifully resistant to the intellect as an Andropov era Pravda editorial. A few more years of this and the Economist won’t have to have any human editing at all. Even today, I imagine that someone with middling coding skills could patch together a passable Economist-editorial generator with a few days work. Mix in names of countries and people scraped from the political stories sections of Google News, with frequent exhortations for “Reform,” “toughminded reform,” “market-led reform,” “painful reform,” “change,” “serious change,” “rupture,” and 12-15 sentences worth of automagically generated word-salad content, and you’d be there.

It’s gotten harder and harder to resubscribe to the Economist. I started having doubts back in 2004, they got worse in 2006. I thought maybe it had improved a bit in the past year, but this right-wing-relfex hatchet job on Hollande (in support of the economic and social barbarian Nicolas Sarkozy) may finally get me to drop the thing, even if they pass the Albania test. And I’ve been a subscriber continuously since the late 70s or early 80s, and was a regular reader even farther back than that.

But frankly, I don’t even read it regularly any more except for the special sections, the science coverage, and the book reviews.

PS. Don’t mistake me for a fan of Hollande. I’ve seen his puppet on Les Guignols de L’Info too often to ever be that.

Posted in Readings, The Media | 1 Comment

Open Access Research – The Money Quote

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

The NIH public-access policy has substantially increased public access to research results with benefits as described below that far outweigh the costs. Similar benefits can be expected from extending such a public access policy to other major federal funders.

from Committee for Economic Development, The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results? issued last week.

Posted in Econ & Money, Internet, Law: Copyright and DMCA, Readings | 1 Comment

Vaclav Havel

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Michael Froomkin
BBC reports that Vaclav Havel has died at age 75.

His book of essays Living in Truth, and especially the essay The Power of the Powerless likely would be high on any list of works I have read that left an imprint.

Posted in Civil Liberties, Readings | Comments Off on Vaclav Havel

Read Me

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

The colleagues have been busy:

Posted in Readings | Comments Off on Read Me

Two Great Essays at Jotwell

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Michael Froomkin

I try not to use this blog to promote my other projects too often for fear of becoming a broken record.  But sometimes I cannot resist.

Over at Jotwell we’ve been publishing a whole lot of interesting reviews of recent scholarship relevant to the law, and I could be bragging about it every week.  But the two most recent essays have been particularly extraordinary, and I recommend them to everyone.

Sex/Power/Law is Robin West‘s review, for our Jurisprudence section, of Marc Spindelman, Essay, Sexuality’s Law,  20 Colum. J. Gender & L. (forthcoming 2011). It begins like this:

Marc Spindelman’s essay Sexuality’s Law, forthcoming in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of legal writing on the interrelations of law, culture and sexuality to appear in a law journal in well over a decade, perhaps much longer.

It ends with:

This is writing that matters, that serves truth, that responds to injury, and that restores one’s faith in the legal academy; this is what legal scholarship can be.

And the stuff in between is well worth your time.

Banana Republic.Com is Frank Pasquale‘s review, for our Cyberlaw section, of Jonathan Zittrain, Ubiquitous Human Computing, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, vol. 366 no. 1881 3813-3821 (28 October 2008):

Wasn’t the internet supposed to solve these problems? Wouldn’t a “wealth of networks” guarantee opportunity for all, as prediction markets unearthed the “wisdom of crowds?”  It turns out that the net, while mitigating some forms of inequality in the US, is accelerating others.  Jonathan Zittrain’s essay “Ubiquitous Human Computing” examines a future of “minds for sale,” where an atomized mass of knowledge workers bid for bite-sized “human intelligence tasks.”  Zittrain explores some positive aspects of the new digital dispensation, but the larger lesson is clear: without serious legal interventions, an expansive global workforce will be scrambling for these jobs by “racing to the bottom” of privacy and wage standards.  This review explains Zittrain’s perspective, applauds his effort to shift the agenda of internet law, and argues that trends untouched on in Zittrain’s essay make his argument all the more urgent.

This review is a little longer than our usual fare, but it’s a rollicking read about a very important subject.

Posted in Law: Internet Law, Legal Philosophy, Readings | Comments Off on Two Great Essays at Jotwell

I So Don’t Do This Networking Stuff

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Michael Froomkin

How to Save the World, a blog I generally like, has a repulsive essay, The Ten Keys To Effective Networking.

The item is repulsive in part because it credibly argues that careers are furthered by treating people as means rather then ends, by selling yourself in a soundbite, and the display and exchange of favors. I’m fine with the exchange of favors stuff — I’m not that much of an ivory tower guy — and I understand that there are times in life when you have to sell. But the idea that you “prune your networks” (abandon people who are not useful), and “understand that every conversation is an implicit contract” (nothing can be abstractly interesting?) is just too much like what I least liked about living in Washington D.C.

And yes, there are a bunch of neat people I’ve met over the years that I wish I kept up with. Life just gets in the way.

[Original draft 3/21/2004. As part of my blog redesign, I’ve been going through draft blog posts that somehow never made it to publication. This is one of them.]

2010: I was reminded of this last night: we went to a very swanky law school event at an large and quite elegant home some small ways south of here. The guest list was studded with important people and large donors.   I didn’t recognize many of them, and ran away from one of the few I did — a right-wing local congressperson — since it seemed like an occasion where I should be polite.   We spoke to a few people we knew.  We went home.

Posted in Readings, Zombie Posts | 6 Comments