Professors may rue them, but MOOCs (massive online open courses) are here to stay. They are one more example of how the Internet is disrupting nearly everything. A particularly thorny question is the matter of copyright: when a professor creates an online course, whose property is it? Can a university refuse to take it offline […]
Jeffrey Toobin, “Heavyweight: How Ruth B
Toobin’s profile of Ginsberg, not surprisingly, is admiring. No surprise there—Toobin is a liberal who likes her liberal jurisprudence. But Justice Ginsberg herself is hard not to admire. She is astonishingly accomplished, and she gets on well with her colleagues, even the sometimes caustic conservative Scalia. (They attend operas together.) Toobin’s piece is an interesting […]
Nick Paumgarten, “The Hangover,” The New
The subtitle for this lengthy, eye-popping, and forehead-slapping article is “the eurozone’s fourth-largest economy has become its biggest liability.” Paumgarten exposes and corruption that is rife in Spain, and also paints a picture of the horrible mess left after an orgy of borrowing and building: “New state-of-the-art airports near Valencia and Madrid are surrendering to […]
Ezra Klein, “Let’s Talk: The Move to Ref
As a preface, let me say that I take no position on the filibuster and whether it should be changed or left as is. So much ink has been spilled re: the filibuster of late. There are those in media who cast it as a horrible thing that gums up the operation of the Senate. […]
Patricia Marx, “Outsource Yourself,” The
The World Wide Web’s disruptions of life are manifold. Most simply, the web permits people to connect who might not have done so otherwise. A woman in Syria tweets and folks around the globe see it. In some cases, the Inter-Tubes are destroying jobs by cutting out the middleman—take publishing for example. Amazon, once a mere […]
Raffi Khatchadourian, “Operation Deliriu
Raffi Khatchadourian has produced yet another eye-popping piece of reporting. “Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of war without killing. He joined the Army in 1956 and left it in 1976, and in that time he did not fight in Vietnam; he did not invade the Bay of Pigs; he did not guard Western Europe with […]