Rise of the Machines
I wrote this opinion piece for the New York Times in the fall of 2008. Since then I’ve become addicted to financial crisis entertainment and parables of the second gilded age: books, movies, documentaries, Matt Taibi in The Rolling Stone, and the incomparable Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times business section. The gateway drugs […]
Congress Shall Make No Law . . .
Law students spend the better part of three years beetling their brows over the study of constitutional law—a mercurial, opaque, highly theoretical system of textual exegesis, which nobody but the tenured and long-winded professor pretends to understand. And the capsheaf of con-law contwistification is First Amendment law. The First Amendment protects “the freedom of speech” […]
Lego Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision. In 2010, a fully-functional […]
Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech & Sexual Harassment
The Wall Street Journal invited Richard Dooling to write its Millennial Essay on Swearing, One Thousand Years of Searing: From Swearing By To Swearing At. Writing in the New York Times, Richard Bernstein called Blue Streak “a charmingly impudent essay on language and sexual politics . . . less an argument than it is a […]
Critical Care: Revisited
The Meaning Of Life Is That It Stops The new IT article on health care: How American Health Care Killed My Father, by David Goldhill, writing in the September 2009 Atlantic. Richard Dooling on NPR’s Talk of the Nation discussing his opinion piece in the New York Times, “Heath Care’s Generation Gap.“ It was my […]