A legal cub named Derek Khanna, rather than finishing his law degree and taking the bar exam, has been steadily transforming himself into something of an anti-copyright celebrity purporting to represent a conservative perspective.  And yesterday,  he offered this inscrutable editorial, which appeared on Business Insider* among other places.  Ostensibly, the article is a criticism of copyright terms (i.e. the length ...

More than a decade ago, a book editor managing her own imprint at one of the big publishing houses gave me some insight into her world that I’ll never forget.  “I have to publish about five diet books,” she told me, “in order to invest in one new novelist.”  It’s important to understand that this is not a comment on ...

Rules are meant to be broken.  It’s not a bad aphorism inasmuch as it contains the spirit of innovation that leads to things like democratic republics in favor of monarchies, cures for horrendous diseases, brilliant works of art, and…yes…iPods.  Of course, as the better English teachers used to say about grammar, it’s okay and even necessary to the task of ...

 “You won’t know who to trust . . .”  It’s a familiar refrain in any number of thrillers in which protagonists find themselves entangled in webs of overlapping conspiracies.  You think you have a position, an ideology, and allies; and it turns out you’re being played by a powerful manipulator pulling strings on both sides of the battle.  The lines ...