I draw your attention to this wonderfully unsentimental yet passionate defense of books by Toby Mundy. The publisher at Atlantic Books, Mundy offers his personal views on the devaluation of the medium for the thought-provoking site Medium.com. Specifically, of course, he draws our attention to Amazon and its Wal-Mart-like ability to muscle publishers (and by extension authors) into lowering prices toward ...
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are presently grappling with existential questions posed by big data and at the same time, considering the social implications of rulings by the supreme court in both Citizens United and Hobby Lobby. In fact, I believe we have an unprecedented mandate at this point in history to more rigorously consider the ...
Sometimes one is confronted with an absurdity so self-evident that it defies an introductory sentence. So, I wrote that sentence instead. But what’s got me gobsmacked today is a story by Adam Sherwin writing for The Independent explaining that Google insisted the popular music site Drowned in Sound censor images of certain album covers on the grounds that they are ...
Bullshit and buzzwords go together like pick-up lines and Jagermeister. And the bullshit buzzword of our times it seems is disruption. Being disruptive used to get your mom called into school for a conference with the teacher; but ever since Clay Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1989, we’ve been fascinated by the disruptive kids, especially the ones who play ...
There are certainly many troubling aspects of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case. That the majority opinion rests on upholding the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act has been rightly criticized, particularly by democratic authors of that bill. The protection of religious freedom for individuals was never intended to extend to for-profit corporations, they say; and certainly this ...
