As American progressives, especially New Yorkers, honor the passing this week of Mario Cuomo, editorials and eulogies in various forms will cite the former governor’s famous keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. In this speech, Cuomo challenged President Reagan’s statement that America is “a shining city on a hill,” which comes from Matthew 5:14; and it is a ...
Andrew Keen’s new book, The Internet is Not the Answer (Atlantic Monthly Press), goes on sale today. This is the third book Keen has written about the Internet and digital-age culture. A native of London, Keen first became an Internet entrepreneur in the US with the founding of Audiocafe.com in 1995, and this new book cites his own personal conversion from early ...
We all know the common criticism that a film adaptation is never “as good as the book.” There are a number of reasons, some of them very subtle, why fans of source materials are easily disappointed by films based on them. Not only is it mandatory that a feature film script leave out a considerable amount of detail from a ...
As a follow-up to my last post about Google churning the Sony hack into SOPA suds, I wanted to call attention to this detailed article by Andrew Orlowski in The Register. In that last piece, I refrained from enumerating Google’s conflicts with the laws of several countries, including our own. I am not an investigative journalist and don’t maintain a detailed diary of ...
Can you hear the bells? They’re not Christmas bells, I’m afraid. They’re Pavlovian bells, the ones that Google loves to ring whenever the company sees an opportunity to rally the faithful to the cause of “internet freedom.” They sound like this: SOPA…SOPA…SOPA. The Sony hack is a bloody mess, the effects of which have yet to be fully realized. So ...
