The Texas Student Publications Board has decided that the student newspaper editor of the Daily Texan should no longer be elected — instead, they’ve decided, it should be appointed by them. Mere students can’t be trusted to make important decisions about who gets to edit the student newspaper, although of course they do get […]
Former MPAA head Jack Valenti’s famous remarks comparing the VCR to the Boston Strangler get alluded to pretty often these days, and Valenti has been at some pains to explain away his remarks as if they weren’t really demonizing the VCR. So it’s helpful now that Valenti’s remarks are more widely available online to quote […]
Ed Felten has come up with his own variant of Godwin’s Law — this one having to do with the ways that rhetoric about pornography tends to infect discussions about copyright. You wouldn’t think the two topics had much to do with each other, except tangentially (pornography makers can claim copyright protection in the works […]
I’ve finally taken my first small steps into direct access to HDTV — I’ve ordered an Elgato Systems eyeTV 500 personal video recorder for my Macintoshes. As is often the case in the Mac world, the item is a little pricier than its PC equivalent, but, as this EFF product review notes, it also […]
There’s this new movie, “The Jacket,” starring Adrien Brody, and I’m
noticing certain similarities to Jack London’s novel THE STAR ROVER.
The premise of “The Jacket,” as I understand it, is that you have a guy
who’s convicted of a murder, then imprisoned (in a hospital for the
criminally insane). During his imprisonment he is […]
I suppose that when my daughter is my age, the cinematic Tarzan she’ll most strongly remember is the Disney version, but for people in my generation and older, the only real movie Tarzan was Johnny Weissmuller. A discussion of Tarzan movies on the WELL recently got me thinking about Weissmuller’s contribution to the character.
WELL […]
I haven’t read Philip Roth’s latest novel, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, yet, because I realized I wanted to read a couple of its American literary precursors first — Jack London’s THE IRON HEEL, published in 1907, and Sinclair Lewis’s IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE, published in 1935. A few months back, I got re-enthused about Jack […]