Garry Trudeau, the creator and writer of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” has a fine article in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle about the kinds of preparations he undertook (and still undertakes) to write about war:
Both soldiers, with the help of incredibly dedicated counselors, are trying to figure out how to live with their emotional wounds as […]
In a panel discussion at a forum at Cardozo Law School in New York last year, I argued that in an age of convergence, the Computer Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) would inevitably end up being applied directly to Internet communications. We’re now seeing my prediction come true.
Officially, CALEA was passed in 1994 […]
My review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, NEVER LET ME GO, is posted now at Reason Online. I liked the book, which was shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize.
I’m quoted in a New York Times Week-in-Review article yesterday, regarding the digital video made on the cheap and set to “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” by the Houston rap duo Legendary K.O.
Even if you don’t like the political sentiment of the piece, it’s clear to me that the feelings of rage and […]
James Ayres, the UT Austin professor of English who founded the Shakespeare at Winedale program (which I’ve blogged about here) lives in Round Top, Texas, about halfway between Houston and Austin (and thus possibly in the path of Hurricane Rita). On Thursday he e-mailed several of his former students, including me, about what it’s […]
The New York Times reports today that the Authors Guild has sued Google Print for “massive copyright infringment” (according to the language of the complaint). The fact that (a) no one can download a complete work, or even most of one, that’s protected by our copyright law (you can get only snippets, based on […]
There are principled arguments that our nation should rely not on regulation but on market forces — specifically, on the skyrocketing prices of gasoline — to trigger fuel efficiency in new automobiles. But leave it to the Wall Street Journal to label government-imposed fuel-efficiency standards as “blood for oil.”
The theory here is that lighter vehicles […]
Never mind that digital audio broadcasting is not significantly greater in quality than regular, analog radio. Never mind that its music quality is vastly less than than that of audio CDs. In spite of these inconvenient facts, the RIAA is hoping that the transition to “digital audio broadcasting” will provide enough confusion and panic that […]
No, I’m not just adding to the zillions of blog postings concerning whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency, along with other government agencies, deserves blame for mishandling the Hurricane Katrina crisis. (You may assume that I assume that the federal government in general, by failing to spend appropriated money on reinforcing New Orleans’s flood protections, […]
I took two weeks off in August, and spent one of those weeks performing Shakespeare dowin in Texas. Yes, I know, it’s not exactly the traditional vacation, but it was definitely something I needed to do. Twenty-five years ago, or so, I discovered the Shakespeare-at-Winedale program at the University of Texas, and over the […]