Law & Society Blog

So recently my alma mater’s student paper, The Gazette, published their annual spoof issue. One satirical article, titled “Labia Majora Carnage”, included a mock-scene which involved the rape of a local feminist-activist by the chief of police. Many readers interpreted the passage to be trivializing rape, if not promoting it. It caught a lot of […]

As seen in Chinatown, NYC.Technorati Tags: NYC, advertisement

I never quite bought into the penguin craze, but I am a complete sucker for pictures, videos, and articles about polar bear cub Knut. Der Spiegel, a reliable source for all things Knut (if not much else), now has a photo gallery of other animal babies. I know, we usually ponder heavy stuff on this […]

Here’s the latest Newsweek poll. Interestingly, 68% think that one can be a moral person and be an atheist. That’s encouraging.
Technorati Tags: religion

Fabio Giglietto took the time to translate my comments on Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form into Italian. Thanks! Check out Fabio’s website, which looks very interesting.Technorati Tags: Spencer Brown, Fabio Giglietto

Check out David Scharf’s brilliant Flash video on YouTube or on his homepage. (HT: BB). Very timely in light of the (altogether unsurprising) revelations about the FBI’s rampant abuse of the National Security Letters. But the problem lies deeper. The ubiquity of privacy invasions (e.g., photographs whenever you enter an office building in New York, […]

One of my favorite descriptions of human nature is from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. Here it is:
Let’s set the existence-of-god issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments […]

Michael Schorr’s movie Schultze Gets the Blues is a quiet meditation on the concept of home and belonging. Schultze is a salt miner sent into early retirement and into a life without purpose. Without family, he is going through the motions, trying to enjoy his bleak, unwanted freedom. (Not coincidentally, the story plays in former […]

Because, according to Robert Nozick, intellectuals can’t get over the fact that school’s over.
It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly. … Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued […]

Amazing!Technorati Tags: music, mozart