There’s been a buzz in the blogosphere about the recent posting at Rolling Stone’s site of an excerpt from James Howard Kunstler’s book The Long Emergency. As the excerpt makes clear, Kunstler’s thesis is that the world is now facing a long (economic, technological, and every other kind of) decline because oil production has […]
Financial Times reports today that Apple’s sales of iPod music players have grown by 616 percent since this time last year, thus confirming what anybody who rides a subway or walks down a city street can see for himself — the country has gone iPod-crazy. (I may count as one of the crazy ones […]
Ernie Miller has been having an exchange with PFF’s James DeLong over the latter’s statement that “‘collective licensing or a media levy’ is a euphemism for turning creativity into a socialist gulag.” Improbably, DeLong defends the analogy, which Ernie says comes pretty close to an instantiation of Godwin’s Law. Note that Ernie is not […]
I’m used to reading frightening articles these days — the ones aboout global warming scare me in particular — but this book review in the Times scared me even more, by suggesting that global competition, together with an absence of well-considered government policy promoting the American economy, may trigger another Great Depression for the United […]
The Daily Texan today is running an opinion piece co-authored by former Texan editor Andy Yemma, former TSP Board chairman Michael Hoffman, and me, calling for restoration/restructuring of Texas Student Publications as a non-profit corporation. As I hoped it would, The Texan frames the piece as an Independence Day-themed editorial.
The history of Texas Student Publications […]
My quick-and-dirty analysis of the Grokster case, its significance and longterm meaning, is up at the Reason Online site.
Here’s an excerpt:
Don’t Stop Grokkin’: Apparent MGM v. Grokster slamdunk is really a mixed bag
… As a technical matter the content companies won MGM v. Grokster; the decision remands the case to a trial court for further […]
The movie industry is desperately worried about the 18-week slump in overall box-office performance. According to the Associated Press:
“Batman Begins” took in $26.8 million to remain the top movie for the second straight weekend, but it could not keep Hollywood from sinking to its longest modern box-office slump.
Overall business tumbled despite a rush of familiar […]
In what seems to me to be a brilliant move, New Yorker Books is offering THE COMPLETE NEW YORKER book and DVD set for 100 dollars. According to the New Yorker Books website, “The Complete New Yorker covers The New Yorker’s entire history, from February 1925 to February 2005, the magazine’s 80th anniversary, providing a […]
Today’s Washington Post has an article by Mark Leibovich that discusses the most recent flurry of Hitler/Nazi comparisons in American political life. It concludes by citing Godwin’s Law and its associated Wikipedia entry.
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After a somewhat skeptically covered beginning last Friday, the “wikitorial” experiment at the Lost Angeles Times has been drawn to an abrupt close.
The reason for the shutdown of the experiment? “Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material,” the LA Times’s […]