- Here's a fascinating story at the intersection of intellectual property, legislative agendas, and greed: Senator Schumer's pro-banking-industry contribution to patent reform that actually makes objective sense, at least if expanded to all method patents.
One might well ask whether similar measures are appropriate to deal copyright trolls like Righthaven, without requiring a judge to consider sanctions... or perhaps to deal with Bratz dolls and overreaching employment contracts, or even improper use of work-for-hire contracts. That, however, seems to be expecting far too much rationality.
- Yawn — another fundamentally flawed "best 100 books" list, this time for "nonfiction", fails to recognize the fundamental problem with all collaborative lists of this nature: They are intensely personal, so the very collaboration is self-defeating. For example, there's not one book on the list that provides more than a cursory discussion of the foundations of post-classical government; surely there was room for John Rawls and/or John Locke in place of, say, even so nicely rounded a work as the Praise of Folly (which requires a fairly substantial background in details of sixteenth-century Catholic practices to understand). A book — and, in particular, a work of serious nonfiction — cannot qualify as "best" to an audience that lacks the existing knowledge to begin to understand it. So, perhaps this list says more about the collective ignorance of those who collaborated to produce it than anything else...
- The lovely and talented Sarah Weinman profiles a literary agency. Be careful: You might learn something, especially between the lines.
And now, off to the dentist...