"Law is too important to be left to lawyers." Paraphrasing the famous adage about war and generals, Mark Chandler, general counsel at Cisco Systems Inc., shared this observation with me in the spring of 2007. We were speaking over Cisco's stunning TelePresence video-conferencing system — he traveling on the East Coast, me on the West — while he grabbed a quick sandwich between meetings. Others had referred to Chandler as one of the most innovative senior lawyers in Silicon Valley, and I was picking his brain about the impact of law on innovation as part of the early phases of a research ... Read More
Will Hispanics Take Over American Politics?
April 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The rapid growth in the U.S. Hispanic population over the last 40 years — both in terms of raw numbers and percentage of the population — is probably the most important emergent force in American politics today. The evidence is around us: In 2008, each party conducted an entire presidential primary debate in Spanish. In 2009, the first Hispanic judge, Sonia Sotomayor, was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. And in 2010, for the first time ever in a single election, three Hispanic candidates won top statewide offices: Republican Brian Sandoval became Nevada's first Hispanic governor; ... Read More
A Psychological Autopsy of Bobby Fischer
December 14, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
At a 1958 tournament in Yugoslavia, Mikhail Tal, a legendary attacking grandmaster and one-time world champion, mocked chess prodigy Bobby Fischer for being "cuckoo." Tal's taunting may have been a deliberate attempt to rattle Fischer, then just 15 but already a major force in the highly competitive world of high-level chess. But others from that world — including a number of grandmasters who'd spent time with him — thought Fischer not just eccentric, but deeply troubled. At a tournament in Bulgaria four years later, U.S. grandmaster Robert Byrne suggested that Fischer see a ... Read More
The Third Way to Media Success
October 12, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Media users now sup at a cornucopia of choice. It's a Golden Age of information and a Dark Age of ill-informed opinion, and traditional and startup media alike frantically cast their (Inter)nets to engage audiences for more than a nanosecond. Those of us in "the media-academic complex" have tended to look at readers, viewers and visitors through two lenses that, at their margins, might be labeled "The Muse" and "The Marketplace." The media leaders looking through the Muse lens try to go beyond what people want right now to satisfy them with what they didn't even know they wanted. A Muse ... Read More
Pay, Baby, Pay
April 30, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
This story originally appeared June 17, 2009. At the start of 1981, Ronald Reagan moved into the White House and named James Watt secretary of the interior. Almost immediately, Watt became the bête noir of liberals — particularly environmental liberals — across the land. Within months, Watt announced an ambitious program that would have expanded offshore energy development into the Pacific and the Atlantic and resulted in the lease of the rights to extract oil and gas from under as much as a billion acres of sea bottom over five years. Watt's plan drew immediate and harsh criticism, ... Read More
The New York Times and a Mistaken Infant Mortality Trend
February 18, 2010 • By • 2 Comments
Anecdotes and stories have long been a dominant means of conveying information and establishing principles, especially moral and religious ones. In a science-oriented society that has entered the information age, the public appetite for empirical data about every aspect of life has emerged as a complementary and sometimes competing way of understanding the world and, particularly, governmental decisions. But if policy-relevant data are often widely available, the capacity to effectively analyze and fully comprehend that data is more limited. As presented in the news media, anecdotes and ... Read More
Handwriting Is History
December 17, 2009 • By • 45 Comments
At 11 p.m. on Dec. 27, I checked my inbox out of habit. I had 581 new e-mails. All had been sent between 8 and 11 p.m. The days between Christmas and New Year's are not usually a busy time for e-mailing. What was going on? It turns out that the home page for MSN.com had linked to a short article I had published a year earlier. In the article, I argue that we should stop teaching cursive in primary schools and provide some background on the history of handwriting to back up my claims. The comments on my piece were hostile, insulting and vehemently opposed to my argument. The onslaught ... Read More
What Really Happened in Rwanda?
October 6, 2009 • By • 19 Comments
In 1998 and 1999, we went to Rwanda and returned several times in subsequent years for a simple reason: We wanted to discover what had happened there during the 100 days in 1994 when civil war and genocide killed an estimated 1 million individuals. What was the source of our curiosity? Well, our motivations were complex. In part, we felt guilty about ignoring the events when they took place and were largely overshadowed in the U.S. by such "news" as the O.J. Simpson murder case. We felt that at least we could do something to clarify what had occurred in an effort to respect the dead and assist ... Read More
The Court(s) and the Election
May 1, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
This story was originally published on our pre-election October 2008 issue. The Supreme Court is always a campaign focus. But the next president's most important effect on the legal system may involve the ideology, race and gender of his relatively anonymous appointees to the federal appellate courts. The stakes in the election, for the Supreme Court and all who live by its rulings, are very, very high." Or so writes The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin. Mr. Toobin is in good company with this pronouncement. The economy has its ups and downs; security threats may come and go; but as far as ... Read More
Lessons From the Reverse Engineering of Nature
April 20, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
On the Significance of Species Beginning in the mid-1980s with evolutionary biologist and writer Stephen J. Gould, the University of Minnesota has invited world-renowned speakers to give public addresses in a lecture series named for the university's longtime president and Graduate School dean, Guy Stanton Ford. In 1994, I had just started as assistant professor in the department of ecology, evolution and behavior when I was thrilled to discover that the speaker for that year would be Richard Dawkins, another famous evolutionary biologist and writer. I joined the hundreds in the packed ... Read More
