Trial by Zoom – A trial lawyer’s view

Trial by Zoom – A trial lawyer’s view

ByAdmin
Editor’s Note:  A trial lawyer in New York City, Bill Beslow has represented many famous, wealthy and powerful people at intensely personal times. In this essay, Bill expounds on how the Zoom Freeze, the Zoom Drop, barking dogs, technical issues and other Zoom Glitchs require radical adjustment of the structure and style of trial practice.

Attorneys in our class will appreciate Bill’s insights; others might enjoy this peek into how attorneys prepare and conduct direct and cross examinations and the extensive, detailed analogies to classical music and dance.

Jim Porter lands NSF grant to continue studying corals

Jim Porter lands NSF grant to continue studying corals

ByAdmin

Jim Porter is a retired professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia, and the National Science Foundation just did something highly unusual: It funded a research grant to continue his studies on coral reefs in the Florida Keys.

Jim is unaware of anyone else who has received an “Individual Investigator” grant from NSF in retirement. His best guess about this accomplishment is this:  Because his long-term work is so timely in assessing the future of coral reefs, NSF and its expert panel of external reviewers decided to fund it regardless of the age or retirement status of its investigator.

New novel from Matt Flynn: Hunting Bernie Weber
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New novel from Matt Flynn: Hunting Bernie Weber

ByAdmin

As Amazon explains:  “Our math genius, Bernie Weber, is a high school student in Milwaukee who has the ability to deduce the prime factors of any large number. (FYI: modern cryptology is based on using large prime numbers, which computers cannot extract when they are used in encoded messages).

When Bernie performs as “Pryme Knumber” in a math circus at a Milwaukee college, an intelligence officer in the audience realizes the value of his innate ability and informs the CIA of this potential human resource. They test Bernie to see if his ability is authentic and decide to give him a thumb drive with an encoded message to crack. By mistake, they give him a top-secret message they have intercepted but have not been able to decipher….

Michael and Maureen Folz release several new songs
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Michael and Maureen Folz release several new songs

ByAdmin

Michael and Maureen are using their new editing / mixing equipment to perfect some new songs, which are publishing-ready.  (Watch for it on Spotify!)   Here are two of the latest recordings.  Check ’em out:

See also
More original music from Michael and Maureen”
and
“Re-releasing your music using new digital editing tools”

The Transformative Experience of Nature

The Transformative Experience of Nature

ByAdmin
Editor’s Note: Chris Hoffman recently published the following essay and offers it to classmates for both enjoyment and feedback.

When priest and earth scholar Thomas Berry was about ten years old, he had a transformative experience upon seeing a certain meadow for the very first time. He says: the sight of that meadow in early May, “together with the sounds of the insects – the crickets, the birds – all of this somehow struck me in such a way that ever since then that meadow has become my norm of reality and value…If we don’t have certain outer experiences, we don’t have certain inner experiences or at least we don’t have them in such a profound way. We need the sun, the …

Rainmaker: Superagent Hughes Norton and the Money-Grab Explosion of Golf
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Rainmaker: Superagent Hughes Norton and the Money-Grab Explosion of Golf

ByAdmin

“Now, in Rainmaker, Norton draws back the curtain on his meteoric rise and abrupt fall. With never-before-told stories and exclusive insights, he discusses what it was like being Tiger Wood’s first agent, his time representing the narcissistic Greg Norman, and shining a bright light on his sudden—and controversial—ouster as the head of IMG’s Golf Division—a juggernaut he helped build. This is an engaging and unforgettable memoir that explores golf as never before.”

Eugene Linden Wins Prestigious Book Award
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Eugene Linden Wins Prestigious Book Award

ByAdmin

The Coun­cil of the Amer­i­can Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal So­ci­ety (AMS) has voted to award Eu­gene Lin­den The Louis J. Bat­tan Au­thor’s Award for his 11th book, Fire and Flood: A Peo­ple’s His­tory of Cli­mate Change, from 1979 to the Pre­sent. A pre­vi­ous work on cli­mate change, Winds of Change: Cli­mate, Weather, and the De­struc­tion of Civl­liza­tions, won the Grantham Prize’s Award of Spe­cial Merit.

A for­mer se­nior writer for TIME Mag­a­zine, where he wrote about na­ture, sci­ence, and …

Re-releasing your music using new digital editing tools
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Re-releasing your music using new digital editing tools

ByAdmin

Michael Folz and wife Maureen have been working and re-working some of their songs using some of the newer recording and engineering technology.  And it’s mind-blowing … well, more ear-blowing. Compare, for example “Right Through My Heart” from 2015 vs. the revision of the same song they created a couple months ago,  The 2015 version…

Matt Flynn’s new book – about a judge on the Court of Appeals
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Matt Flynn’s new book – about a judge on the Court of Appeals

ByWayne Willis

Matt Flynn’s newest book differs from his series on Bernie Weber, math genius.  His new thriller is set closer to home, namely, Matt’s experience as a court clerk on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago.  He hastens to add that the scenes in the book about cheating with an attractive Asian co-clerk are pure fiction. 😉
Plot Summary:  In The Court of Last Resort, Federal Judge Adam Willow, a former Marine commando, demands perfect justice. Some defendants …

Self-censorship by Fear, or by Seduction?

Self-censorship by Fear, or by Seduction?

ByJim Sleeper

Note: In 2012 I gave a talk to a group of Yale undergrads who gathered at the Yale War Memorial on Beinecke Plaza — about how liberal education, especially at elite institutions such as Yale, finesses but sometimes clarifies the difference between self-censorship that’s prompted by fear of a state, of corporate employers, and of other authorities versus a kind of self-censorship that’s prompted by the seductions of power, i.e., by calculating that …

Announcing a new section — “Works”

Announcing a new section — “Works”

ByAdmin

Increasingly, classmates are creating really interesting essays, music, paintings, presentations, playlists, plays, podcasts and other creations we are calling “Works” (as in “works of art”).

Coupled with the existing categories of Op-Eds and Books, this website can serve as a display case where classmates can share their “Works” with classmates.  Hopefully, the viewers, readers, listeners, etc. will give some feedback in the comments.