meant to blog this:

Jane Jacobs died last week (April 25th). The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of the books I read as a young'un sitting around my dad's office that stuck with me far more than any book I'm liable to read nowadays. One of the books that explained how the world is and how it should be. Such books don't exist anymore, due to this silly critical thinking habit I've picked up - I mean 'silly' somewhat facetiously, but I do end up arguing the devil's advocate against authors more often than I'd like.

(different topic: how to cure devil's advocatism?)

Voila, a segue - last Friday I saw Lawrence Lessig speak at NYU. He's a good speaker, with a brilliant & mesmerizing slide technique - you can see the presentation he gave here. It was inspiring, in the sense of a call to arms, although he didn't offer a clean solution (there never is one, is there) - as well as frustrating, because they put him on a panel with two other lawyer types who managed not to understand a word he said. One went so far as to disbelieve the existence of frivolous lawsuits and the undermining of fair use.

As a good blogger I should have some interesting (critical...) thoughts on all this. But, I agree with Lessig, without his articulateness, so just watch his talk already. His final point, that less-free&fair use rights end up undermining youth's respect for the law, and contribute to the general collapse of society, is extremely powerful, in that it connects to many other points of contension (marijuana legalization, gay marriage, etc.). Just about everyone I know has knowingly broken a law at some point or other, and depending on the executive to turn a blind eye seems like a unsustainable situation - especially considering today's political situation and the consolidation of powers in the White House.

<summary wrap up sentence before going to bed>