The close, unholy, and corrupt relationship between Wall Street and Capitol Hill isn’t really news any more. And so inured have our sensibilities become to the giant, rigged con-game that is today’s financial-political system, that exposure to yet another one of its details fails to induce any suitably condemnatory reaction. Still, that said, when aContinue reading “How Low Can You Go? The Market for Regulatory Fees”
Category Archives: Books
Epistolary Warfare in the Letters Section
Readers of the New York Review of Books are used to the sometimes intemperate, bordering-on-pedantic, yet-always-carefully-crafted display of bruised egos that takes up so much space toward the end of each issue. I am referring, of course, to the Letters section. Here the author, formerly delighted to find out his masterpiece was to be reviewedContinue reading “Epistolary Warfare in the Letters Section”
Concurring Opinions Online Symposium on A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents
Remember that New York Times article about all the legal headaches that Google’s autonomous cars are causing? Well, if you found that interesting, you should read on. On February 14-16, the Concurring Opinions blog will host an online symposium dedicated to a discussion of my book A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents. (Many thanksContinue reading “Concurring Opinions Online Symposium on A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents”
Lorin Stein on Ben Lerner’s Adam: An Aspiring Poet’s Worries
In reviewing Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station (“The White Machine of Life”, New York Review of Books, December 8 2011, Vol 58, Number 19), Lorin Stein notes that Adam, the novel’s central character, is “a poet who doesn’t have much feeling for poetry, for art in general.” And this poet is confronted aContinue reading “Lorin Stein on Ben Lerner’s Adam: An Aspiring Poet’s Worries”
Marcus Aurelius On Correcting Others
In his Meditations (Book One), Marcus Aurelius offers us a lesson in constructive criticism: From Alexander the grammarian, [I learned] to refrain from fault-finding, and not in a reproachful way to chide those who uttered any barbarous or solecistic or strange-sounding expression; but dexterously to introduce the very expression which ought to have been used,Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius On Correcting Others”
Nietzsche on CEOs And Insider Trading
CEO hagiography has a long and well-established tradition in our time. Despite the–sometimes really well-written–mountains of evidence to suggest that they do little to deserve the size of their pay packets–which grow ever more obscene and disconnected from reality, and despite a nagging feeling that especially in the world of modern finance, a CEO’s successContinue reading “Nietzsche on CEOs And Insider Trading”
Milton’s Satan, Heaven and Hell, And The Mind
A few posts ago, in writing about the detritus that can be found on professor’s office doors, I had recounted a little self-indulgent story about first finding Cavafy’s The City. Today, I want to point you to another ‘found’ poem–more accurately, a fragment–located, not on an office door but rather, in a budding poet’s workspace.Continue reading “Milton’s Satan, Heaven and Hell, And The Mind”
FOSS Licenses: Hackers As Legal Maestros
Over at Concurring Opinions, Biella Coleman writes a very good post on her anthropological work on hackers. In it Biella states what many of us who have looked at the world of free and open source software think: [M]any developers are nimble legal thinkers, which helps explain how they have built, in a relatively shortContinue reading “FOSS Licenses: Hackers As Legal Maestros”
Fiction, Non-Fiction, Essays, Posterity
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post disagreeing with Katha Pollitt’s claim that (roughly), Even the best non-fiction writers only get read by future generations if they are lucky enough to have written some quality best-selling fiction. Pollitt had referred to “columnists and essayists and book reviewers” in her original post, but inContinue reading “Fiction, Non-Fiction, Essays, Posterity”
John Wycliffe And Academic Freedom
I’m an academic; quite understandably, one of my concerns is often academic freedom. Mine, and that of my colleagues. My employer, the City University of New York, has had a mixed relationship with academic freedom over the years (this ambivalent attitude was perhaps best on display during the Tony Kushner flap last year). But myContinue reading “John Wycliffe And Academic Freedom”
Samir Chopra 