My friend Harvey Silverglate, a prominent Cambridge-based criminal-defense and civil-liberties lawyer, activist, and writer and the chair of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is looking for a research assistant. Here's a job description:
CIVIL LIBERTIES/CRIMINAL LAW RESEARCH & WRITING POSITION STARTING MID-SUMMER 2008
HARVEY A. SILVERGLATE -- a lawyer, writer, lecturer, and advocate -- seeks a relatively recent college graduate to work with him, primarily out of his Cambridge, Mass., home-office, as a researcher and paralegal on a variety of criminal law and civil liberties projects. This is an ideal position for someone considering a career in law, advocacy, writing, or journalism, but who wants a year or two of unusually interesting and challenging work experience before returning to school or the regular job market. A major component of the job will entail editing/revising, working with the publisher's editors, and, upon publication, promoting a book about how the U. S. Department of Justice uses vague and broad federal criminal statutes and regulations to harass civil society. Applicant would also assist Silverglate writing newspaper columns (with shared bylines when appropriate), articles, and lectures; working with the ACLU of Massachusetts (on whose Board of Directors Silverglate serves) and with The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, www.thefire.org (of which Silverglate is cofounder and current Chairman of the Board); and implementing a civil liberties-oriented blog jointly undertaken with another civil liberties advocate and culture critic. In addition, applicant would assist Silverglate with criminal defense and civil liberties litigation cases done in collaboration with a small Boston law firm. Applicants for this demanding, unconventional, and interesting position should be creative self-starters and be able to focus on projects with a laser-like intensity, and must be well-organized, energetic, computer and Internet savvy, deeply devoted to liberty, decidedly politically incorrect, independent, and an excellent writer and editor. This is a job for a Type-A personality with real passion and high-octane. Salary is competitive for this kind of work; full medical insurance benefits provided.
Send inquiries, cover letters, and resumes to: hill-at-GoodCormier.com, with a copy to wolfe-at-harveysilverglate.com. Peruse www.HarveySilverglate.com for a sense of the variety of work involved. No phone calls or agencies.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 03, 2008 • Comments
Dan Drezner asked professors to send in the worst student sentence they've read in a paper. He now posts the winners--a three-way tie, with representatives of three different types of badness.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 03, 2008 • Comments
Live-blogging the Iowa Caucus results, Reason's David Weigel makes a good point about the caucus winners:
I'm by no means the first person to say this, but here's the key difference between the parties tonight. Half of Democrats look at this picture and feel neutral; half of them look at it and feel elated. Half of Republicans look at [t]his picture and feel worried; one-quarter feel enraged; one-quarter are happy, but it's that bitter, Kurt Russell dropping the truck on the bad guy in Breakdown kind of happy. If they weren't Christians they'd be flipping the bird.
A lot of Republicans and independents are glad to see Hillary come in third. As a Republican-leaning independent, I'm one of them, even though I (gaggingly) prefer her to Edwards or, for that matter, Huckabee. Could she please just go away?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 03, 2008 • Comments
Blogger Frank Piller has a nice roundup, including links to previous posts, on growing trend toward do-it-yourself user innovation, manufacturing, and distribution. It looks like the price of a 3-D printer has finally dropped to less than $5,000, though that doesn't mean you can just "print out" anything you can design on a computer. As this recent WSJ article (PDF file on non-WSJ site) reported, an early application is to make figurines of user's characters from World of Warcraft and other games. But some features, notably flowing capes, can be tricky.
I wrote about MIT management professor Eric von Hippel's research on user-driven innovation in this NYT column.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 03, 2008 • Comments
Click here for the winners of the second international Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest. View all the entries here. In an example of copyright protection at the expense of publicity, the site makes it impossible to display an image here.
And here are the winners of the Materials Research Society's Science as Art Contest for 2007 (including the one above), 2006, and 2005, downloadable as wallpaper.
[Via Good Morning Silicon Valley.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 03, 2008 • Comments
Why can't the implements for dealing with a chronic disease look better? Thoughts on the need for better, more aesthetically pleasing design from a smart and sensitive blog about living with Type 1 diabetes.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 28, 2007 • Comments
In the December Atlantic, Sarah Chayes tells the fascinating, frustrating story of her Afghan adventures in entrepreneurship--and the utter lack of interest she encountered from U.S. funders charged with aiding Afghan economic development. Her business idea was brilliant--high value, low weight products that play perfectly into the U.S. aesthetic economy.
This is what we do: Eleven Afghan men and women and I scour this harried land for its (licit) bounties and turn them into beauty products. Our soaps, colored with local vegetable dyes and hand-molded and smoothed till they look like lumps of marble, and our oils, elixirs for polishing the skin, sell in boutiques that cater to the pampered in New York, Montreal, and San Francisco.
The scale of the effort--we sell about $2,500 worth of soap per month--is tiny. Still, our business, the Arghand Cooperative, represents what reports and think tanks say places like Afghanistan need: sustainable economic development. And it is almost entirely the product of private enthusiasm and generosity. From the institutional donors whose job I naively thought was to foster initiatives like ours, we have reaped much travail but almost no support.
Chayes's story is a must read. (The magazine must think so too, since this is a free link.)
Former World Bank economist William Easterly put his finger on the problem in The White Man's Burden
(which I reviewed here). Aid agencies reward "planners," who work from the top down, while effective aid requires "searchers," who rely on trial and error and local knowledge. Chayes adds another dimension, suggesting that aid agencies also like to make really big grants, which tend to favor those planners. Her enterprise is probably better off without the bureaucratic entanglements that come with large-scale aid--but not if it fails for lack of capital.
One reason I support Spirit of America is that it gives U.S. military personnel deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa the small-scale, private funding they need to meet local needs, without a lot of bureaucracy.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 27, 2007 • Comments
Grant McCracken explains.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 27, 2007 • Comments
The LAT's My-Thuan Tran reports on one result of the policy divide I discussed in my November Atlantic column (free link). Vietnamese-Americans are leaving Orange County for Houston, which also has a large Vietnamese community, in search of housing priced for middle-class families. The story's lead:
Lan Nguyen had dreamed of owning a house since she immigrated to Southern California from Vietnam 11 years ago. But she and her husband could never scrounge up enough money for a down payment, spending most of their paychecks on rent for a cramped Garden Grove apartment.
Now, Nguyen has moved to a suburb of this Gulf Coast city, where the 28-year-old owns a new four-bedroom house with a spacious game room and access to a pool with a water slide -- all for $200,000.
Nguyen is one of many Vietnamese Americans from California who have flocked to Houston, lured by cheap real estate, a lower cost of living, bountiful business opportunities and a thriving, growing Vietnamese community.
Houston offers a slice of the American Dream to Vietnamese Americans who couldn't find it in California.
In San Jose and Orange County, home to the country's largest Vietnamese enclaves, skyrocketing rents and staggering housing prices -- even in a down market -- have become too much for some.
"At first, we thought California is the best," Nguyen said. "It's sad to move from a place we know so well. But here we own a beautiful house and are very comfortable."
Meanwhile, in housing-hostile California, I noticed a mention in passing that the Santa Monica powers-that-be had nixed the Santa Monica Mall's "an ambitious plan to replace its struggling indoor mall with an outdoor shopping venue topped with three 21-story condo towers, an apartment building and an office complex." The mall will simply remodel to integrate better with the bustling 3rd Street Promenade, and the people who might have occupied those new condos and apartments will continue to commute from parts east. (Via L.A. Curbed.)
Critics of my column thought I was too broad brush in characterizing the populations of cities like Dallas and cities like L.A. Obviously, there are still (some) middle class people in Southern California, but you don't have to be Vietnamese to feel the pull of Texas. The number of Californians moving out is larger than the number moving in, with the trend pronounced among families, and the state is losing losing native-born college grads to other states (a shortfall so far mitigated by immigrant college graduates).
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 27, 2007 • Comments
Wired explains.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 27, 2007 • Comments
