Category: issues

“The boundary between the expression of an idea which copyright protects and the underlying idea which cannot be protected is a fluid one.”

“Unfriending has become so rampant that the word was 2009’s word of the year in the Oxford Dictionary. Emotions run high around unfriending, too — especially now that there are apps that notify users when they’ve been dropped from someone else’s Facebook list. There have even been cases of people reacting violently in real life to a cyber unfriending.”

“‘Slut’ is a charged word even when it’s just used metaphorically. … And it is hard to imagine ‘slut’ being reclaimed the way ‘queer’ was, as a respectable label for academic programs and cultural centers. … Maybe someday ‘slut’ will be as comically dated as ‘bounder’ or ‘cad.’ But in recent times, it has actually become stronger and more offensive.”

“This is my worry: the homeless turned not just into walking, talking hotspots, but walking, talking billboards for a program that doesn’t care anything at all about them or their future, so long as it can score a point or two about digital disruption of old media paradigms. So long as it can prove that the real problem with homelessness is that it doesn’t provide a service.”

“The very concept of ‘Islamic art’ is alien to the cultures that adhered to Islam, but that apparently has never troubled the scholars who hold forth on the subject in their books as in their university lectures. … The denial of cultural identity in such a meaningless phrase is deeply resented in those Islamic lands, which have ancient cultures that are considerably longer than any West European nation.”

“The more people replied, the more people demanded to be removed, and in increasingly hostile tones. … Then, a strange thing happened. Camaraderie broke out amid the spam. … Dozens of people traded contact information. And just like that, what started as a petty annoyance, a blight common to our interconnected lives, became something quite different.”

Re-enactors of the War of 1812 create a history for Canada. But “the reality is murkier. Canadians weren’t yet Canadians. The term was still applied mostly to francophones, and when Upper Canada was created in 1791 – a mere eight years after the U.S. War of Independence ended – it was designed more as a bulwark against the American expansionists than a statement of New World identity.”

“Thomas Jefferson’s very existence was shaped and enabled by slavery. Slaves placed newborn Thomas in his cradle, and slaves comforted the former president on his deathbed.” Now those 607 slaves have an exhibit of their own.

Writer Delia Ephron’s domain name goes mysterious – and it takes an international effort to even think about getting it back.

“You can almost hear timpani rumbling and horns ablaze when the Smith Center for the Performing Arts is mentioned in the Valley. Clouds part. Angels sing. People who were lost are found. … Not even a multibillion-dollar casino, promising new jobs and more tourists, can elicit such emotion within locals who are pinning community hopes on Downtown’s stately limestone centerpiece.”