In a recent New Yorker piece bemoaning standard Beltway coverage of politics as all maneuvering and image management, George Packer imagined the same style applied to foreign coverage—intending to highlight how absurd it seems: Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully […]

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When it’s a carefully-worded statement from Lindy Matsko, the vice principal implicated in the Pennsylvania school webcam spying lawsuit: “At no time have I ever monitored a student via a laptop webcam,” said Matsko, who is in her 25th year working for Lower Merion School District, “nor have I ever authorized the monitoring of a […]

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A surprising number of the responses to my recent video on social remix complain that the various videos of kids acting out their own versions of the Lisztomania “Brat Pack” mashup video simply don’t count as a form of creativity.  To be sure, they are not  timeless works of starting originality, but this sort of […]

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This HuffPo piece strikes me as just about right. Look, I don’t think Sarah Palin is terribly bright, but even I assume that if she can deliver a speech without notes, she can remember four or five bullet-point “priorities” without recourse to a list scrawled on her hand. If, for some reason, she couldn’t, I […]

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Ok, so, I get both the legal and the substantive beefs people have with Citizens United.  I’m basically a “political speech? well, bugger off” sort of guy, so all this business about whether corporations are +3 paladins or whatever just doesn’t interest me, but I understand the arguments. Bracketing all that, though, if you really […]

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Sonny Bunch over at America’s Future Foundation gets all wound up over the idea that copyright is centrally about creating an instrumental incentive for production: Yes, copyright was created in part because there were concerns that authors wouldn’t bother creating new work if they were consistently stolen from, leading to Yglesias’s oddly solipsistic reading of […]

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The New York Times on China’s hacker underground: Three weeks ago, Google blamed hackers that it connected to China for a series of sophisticated attacks that led to the theft of the company’s valuable source code. Google also said hackers had infiltrated the private Gmail accounts of human rights activists, suggesting the effort might have […]

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