From the monthly archives:

August 2008

Linkblog

Every Print Diva Must Have A Website [Huffington Clones]

Every Print Diva Must Have A Website [Huffington Clones]
You know how you are always saying to yourself “What the world needs now is a …

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Linkblog

Taverna Kyclades (4)/5) on Yelp.com

Taverna Kyclades (4)/5) on Yelp.com
Holy smokes, they deliver the heaping plateful here. A $10 peasant salad that could feed five. Grilled calamari swollen to …

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Linkblog

Bohemian Hall Beer Garden (3)/5) on Yelp.com

Bohemian Hall Beer Garden (3)/5) on Yelp.com
An institution like none other in NY.…

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Linkblog

Falafel Chula (3)/5) on Yelp.com

Falafel Chula (3)/5) on Yelp.com
Reasonable shwarama—and I don’t know if the hood has better—but it would take repeat trips to know if this is …

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Linkblog

Huckleberry Bar (3)/5) on Yelp.com

Huckleberry Bar (3)/5) on Yelp.com
Pleasant backyard. Friend call it the most grown-up bar in Billyburg. Does remind me something of Brooklyn Social without the …

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Linkblog

But, like many public figures who are so reliably excellent they risk monotony, Wood is saved from his abilities by his fascinating limitations. He is, in spite of his prodigious gifts, mystifyingly, perversely, delightfully limited. His sensibility—high-minded, self-serious, evangelical—seems to have been pickled back in 1863, so that he appears to be carrying out a Borgesian experiment of restaging Matthew Arnold’s entire career in an era that has learned to ignore Victorian sagery. Among our book blogs and digital libraries and metacritical review-collating hyperlinked global salons, Wood remains provocatively analog. His pronouncements arrive walnut-paneled, camphor-sprinkled, and attended by retinues of white-gloved footmen.

But, like many public figures who are so reliably excellent they risk monotony, Wood is saved from his abilities by his fascinating limitations. He is, …

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Linkblog

Building on Bond (4)/5) on Yelp.com

Building on Bond (4)/5) on Yelp.com
Watch this space. I took in Building on the evening of its first day. It’ll operate from 7 AM …

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Linkblog

We hear a lot about the “tragedy of the commons”: if a valuable asset (a grazing field, say) is held in common, each individual will try to exploit as much of it as possible. Villagers will send all their cows out to graze at the same time, and soon the field will be useless. When there’s no ownership, the pursuit of individual self-interest can make everyone worse off. But Heller shows that having too much ownership creates its own problems. If too many people own individual parts of a valuable asset, it’s easy to end up with gridlock, since any one person can simply veto the use of the asset. The commons leads to overuse and destruction; the anticommons leads to underuse and waste. In the cultural sphere, ever tighter restrictions on copyright and fair use limit artists’ abilities to sample and build on older works of art. In biotechnology, the explosion of patenting over the past twenty-five years—particularly efforts to patent things like gene fragments—may be retarding drug development, by making it hard to create a new drug without licensing myriad previous patents.

We hear a lot about the “tragedy of the commons”: if a valuable asset (a grazing field, say) is held in common, each individual will …

[read more]

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