Au Courant

I’ve always thought of blog posts as basically being open letters to some editor or other. In this case, I attempt to take the New York Times to task for coding Hillary Clinton as the winner of the Democratic primaries in Michigan and Florida. In both states the Democratic National Committee promised NOT […]

From yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education
In 2005, when the Motion Picture Association of America stepped up its campaign against college movie pirates, officials with the trade group said that 44 percent of the film industry’s domestic losses were the result of illegal downloads on campus networks.
That statistic — which came from a report by a […]

Like everyone else who follows the blogs and listserves that everyone else follows, over the past month or so I have had the opportunity to skim thousands of comments on the new Amazon Kindle. I haven’t actually played with a Kindle, yet, but if ever a subject were well covered by the secondary literature, […]

I hate the phrase, “scholarly communication.”
It’s not that I hate the practice, which I view as a pinnacle of human achievement, without which the life and work of many (including me) would be meaningless. It’s that the phrase itself connotes a mechanical process, rather than the transcendent purpose that underlies the activity itself.
Decoding […]