Remainders: what will be, what is, and what was edition
The Sonny Bono copyright extension, sought by Disney and enacted in 1998, prevents the final three volumes of a new translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time from being published in the States before 2018. According to Aaron Matz, these volumes “mark the very summit of Proust’s art.”
Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit inspires Timothy Noah to call bullshit on the Bush Administration. (The article also contains an unfortunate plug for a book by judge and loathsome law and economics scholar Richard Posner, A/K/A the “human Pentium processor.” But that’s hardly news. The piece was penned by Timothy Noah, after all.)
FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith “says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign’s Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate’s press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.” (Thanks to The Situation Room for the link.)
The man who led a successful effort to establish English as the official language of Iowa has thrown his support behind the English Language Unity Act of 2005, which would require the U.S. government “to conduct business in English, but [would] not put restrictions on languages spoken in daily life or used in private business.” Horrible. (Is it wrong for me to get a kick out of imagining the rioting that would ensue among South Florida government leaders if anyone tried to enforce that kind of law down there? If I had my copy of Joan Didion’s Miami, I’d quote her description of government meetings in Miami-Dade. Via Ildikos.)
