Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground

Weblog Review: Remembering Walter Ong

Weblog of the Week: Remembering Walter Ong

Why I Like It: Remembering Walter Ong is a weblog designed by Jonathan Druy to commemorate the life and work of Walter J. Ong, S.J., who died August 12, 2003. Druy's weblog was set up just days after Ong's death to collect tributes to Ong by his friends, colleagues and former students.  It's an interesting use of weblogging technology and a fitting tribute to this Jesuit scholar who has been called "one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century."

The focus of Ong's work was "the evolution of human consciousness via the history of communication." Together with an early mentor, Marshall McLuhan, Ong studied communication, hoping to "map out the changing boundaries of human thought by tracing the shift from the world of oral communication (the songs of Homer and biblical proverbs meant to be stored in memory) to script (the world of ancient and medieval culture) to print (the Gutenberg revolution) to electronic information (television and computer)." The quotes are from a good introduction to Ong's work by Jeet Heer.

As an English major at St. Louis University, I was lucky enough to study under Ong, who was always lively and engaging but a tough grader on his famous two-page writing assignments. One of his teaching goals was to show his students how to write tight, economical prose. Of six papers I wrote for Ong, I only received a full A on the last one. Ong's handwritten comment: "Nice specifics."  The real compliment was when he read the paper out loud to the class, which was something I won't forget.

During my time as an English major at St. Louis University, Ong was present for every student reading of fiction or poetry. I remember how he always had something nice to say about my own work when other professors, perhaps turned off by my stringently conservative newspaper Op-Eds (imagine that), did their best to avoid me. When I returned to St. Louis University for law school, I would see Ong around campus, and he was always supportive of my idea of a writing career that, fortunately or unfortunately, had to be placed on hold when I went to work for a law firm.

Recommended Reading: Remembering Walter Ong contains links to a number of resources about Ong's work, as well as mp3 files containing a Walter Ong lecture, interview, and tribute. Other Walter Ong sites are the Walter Ong Project, the Walter Ong Wiki (with a picture of Ong that reminds me of how he looked in my law school days), and the very interesting weblog Notes from the Walter J. Ong Archives, which chronicles John Walter's attempts to organize and catalogue the Walter J. Ong Collection at St. Louis University's Pius XII Memorial Library.

Related Posts: The Weblog Review Series--all prior weblog reviews

Weblog Review: Diary of a Suburban Priest

Weblog of the Week: Diary of a Suburban Priest, by Fr. Ethan McCarthy

Why I Like It: As a Jesuit-educated weblog author, I shouldn't have been surprised to learn that priests were publishing weblogs (or doing podcasts). But I was surprised. The idea was also immediately appealing. Even to someone who has spent his entire life around Catholic priests (though not as much recently), there's something that seems foreign and unknowable about them, perhaps because it's so hard to comprehend their decision to become ordained. And when a priest calls his weblog a "diary," it's hard not to read. I've found it very interesting.

Recommended Reading:

1. Fr. Ethan discloses ten things he's done that his readers probably haven't. ("Note," he says, "some of these things happened long before I became a priest.")

2. Fr. Ethan explains "why men hate church."

3. Fr. Ethan writes about a point of Catholic theology that seems simple and obvious, but which I most likely would have gotten wrong if you'd asked me.

Related Posts: The Weblog Review Series--all prior weblog reviews

Weblog Review: Maud Newton

Weblog of the Week: Maud Newton

Why I Like It: Maud Newton, the creation of writer Maud Newton, is my favorite weblog about books and writing. I read it for a lot of reasons--books news, literary gossip, and insight from Maud and her guest writers. Whenever I don't read it, I feel like I'm missing something.

It's that newsy feel that might explain why Maud Newton has attracted so much attention from traditional media sources like USA Today and The Washington Post.
You can learn more in Maud's "canned bio," which also reveals that she was once a lawyer. That fact figured in a post I did last year: "Maud Newton, Lawyer-Writer."

Recommended Reading:

1. In two recent posts, Maud writes about F. Scott Fitzgerald's Contemporary Authors profile and the interesting practice of bookcrossing.

2. In a post about Disney's adaptation of C.S. Lewis' The Narnia Chronicles, Maud predicts that a "shitstorm" will greet the film's release.

3. In a post about waiters in New York City, Maud passes on some gossip about John Grisham.

Related Posts: The Weblog Review Series--all prior weblog reviews

Weblog Review: The Long Tail

Weblog of the Week: The Long Tail

Why I Like It: The Long Tail weblog was created by Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, as a sort of companion to his October 2004 article about the Internet, "The Long Tail," which will be published in an expanded book form in 2006. 

As explained at Wikipedia, Anderson's long-tail idea describes how retailers like Amazon and Netflix have revolutionized marketing by showing that "products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough."

You'll find various other definitions of the long tail on Anderson's weblog. (E.g., "[t]he Long Tail is the realization that the sum of many small markets is worth as much, if not more, than a few large markets.") Though the long-tail idea is only months old, you'll see it cropping up everywhere in forms unrelated to marketing. For example, it's used to explain why weblogs or podcasts can find an enthusiastic core audience even if they are on the narrowest of topics.

The long-tail concept is best understood in terms of specific examples, which are plentiful in Anderson's weblog and his original Wired article.

Recommended Reading:

1. In a post about Google, Anderson uses the long-tail concept to explain why Google Ads are making Google so rich.

2. In a post about the iPod Shuffle, Anderson uses the long-tail concept to explain why it's a bad idea.

3. In a post about copyright, Anderson attempts to harmonize the long-tail concept with Lawrence Lessig's idea that "most creative work doesn't have value for long and doesn't need as much protection as it gets."

Related Posts: The Weblog Review Series--all prior weblog review posts

Weblog Review: Love and Casino War

Weblog of the Week: Love and Casino War

Why I Like It: Love and Casino War is a poker and gambling weblog that's had a good long run, more than two years of posting. I first learned about it when its author, Jeremy ("JK at the poker table"), linked to one of my few gambling posts: "Life on the Mississippi, or One Lawyer's Gambling Confession." Jeremy called it a "great little story," and I'm still getting readers from his weblog more than a year later.

Jeremy's main interest--poker in Texas--is a narrow one, but he writes about it with such enthusiasm that his weblog has a devoted audience. It's the "long tail" of the Internet at work: through the magic of search engines, a topic not destined for a mass audience can still be seized upon by a large group of willing readers.

Recommended Reading:

1. Jeremy's well-researched post about "the legality of poker in Texas."

2. Jeremy's explanation of "bad beats."

[Below the Fold: Other posts in the weblog review series.]

Weblog Review: Preposterous Universe

Weblog of the Week: Preposterous Universe

Why I Like It: If you had asked me about my career ambitions in junior high, I would have said, "I want to be a physicist. That, or an astronomer." I walked the walk, too, building a 6-inch Newtonian reflector in sixth grade from scratch--meaning that I ground the mirror with sand, like amateur astronomers used to do before premade parabolic mirrors became cheap. Thirty years later and rebuilt from the ground up, my kids still use that telescope.

Meanwhile, I became a lawyer. Where did I go wrong? I don't know, but now most of my scientific adventures are limited to reading books--or, now that we've entered the 21st century, weblogs.

Preposterous Universe is written by a physicist named Sean Carroll who teaches at the University of Chicago. Its tagline: "ideas on culture, science, politics." In an entertaining welcome post more than a year ago, Carroll wrote:

The plan is to occasionally talk about science, both substance and politics (the decision to abandon further servicing missions for the Space Telescope was the issue that first made me want to start this), but also about things that have nothing to do with science. If Matt Drudge can have a significant impact on our nation's political culture, why not me?

Carroll's weblog contains plenty of provocative writing about a number of topics, which he examines with an inviting and readable style that makes his weblog very fun to read. 

Recommended Reading:

1. In a post titled "Conservatives, science, academia," Carroll discusses "[t]he tendency of academics to be liberal." (56 comments!)

2. In a post about the discovery of a new planet, Carroll concludes, "the relentless series of new discoveries has to make the Hubble-killers uncomfortable."

3. In an post about same-sex marriage, Carroll writes, "I am convinced that, a few decades down the road, anyone who today is against same-sex marriages will be judged just as badly as everyone else throughout history who has fought to preserve discrimination of some minority on the basis of an irrational aversion on the part of the majority."

4. In a post titled "The most important questions in physics," Carroll reports on a list by David Gross of the top 25.

[Below the Fold: Other posts in the weblog review series.]

A Review of This Site on Blawg Review

Perhaps it's a little incestuous that the Editor of Blawg Review posted some kind words about Legal Underground in "Previewing Blawg Review #1." After all, I'm a contributing editor of Blawg Review--the Editor's got to be nice to me. But oh well. It gives me another chance to remind everyone to submit their own favorite posts for Monday's first edition. The rules are here. The deadline is Saturday at midnight.

The Editor's post also gives me another opportunity to point out that I'm not the Editor. Since he's chosen to remain anonymous, people assume he must be me or Kevin Heller, the other contributing editor. But he's not. Why the Editor has chosen to be anonymous, I'm not sure, but I suppose he has his reasons. (Memo to Editor: No matter how hard you try, you'll always lack the sex appeal of Belle de Jour.)

In any case, I'm serious about this next point: it would be unethical for me to write a complimentary review of this site and post it somewhere else anonymously. That's not what happened, I'm not the Editor of Blawg Review, end of story.

Weblog Review: Ordinary Weblogs

What's an "ordinary" weblog? I suppose it would be one of those highly personal sites that read like the Christmas letters you might receive from distant relatives each year. I once had some fun turning Legal Underground into an ordinary weblog for a day when I handed over the site to an unemployed acquaintance named Al.

Al's series of posts, which are collected here, do double duty as my own introduction and review of the typical ordinary weblog.

[Below the Fold: Other posts in the weblog review series.]

Weblog Review: Audioblogs.info

Weblog of the Week: Audioblogs.info

Why I Like It: While there are lot of podcast directories--Podcast Alley and Podcast.net, to name just two--there don't seem to be many weblogs devoted to  podcasting content or technology. Am I just looking in the wrong places? With podcasting taking off the way it is, you would think there would be people documenting its growth in weblogs that would help listeners sort through the gobs of podcasts that are now available.

One exception to the general rule is Audioblogs.info. Its author, Harold J. Johnson, calls his weblog "the information portal for audioblogs." Although Johnson does not write very much about the content of particular podcasts, his weblog contains a lot of helpful information for podcasting novices.

The best part of Johnson's weblog is the sidebar on its right side, which contains links to a wealth of podcasting resources.

Recommended Reading:  In a post titled "Podcasting/Audioblogging Audio Setups," Johnson describes a typical podcasting setup.

[Below the Fold: Other posts in the weblog review series.]

Weblog Review: Kevin, M.D.

Weblog of the Week: Kevin, M.D., by Dr. Kevin Pho

Why I Like It: You thought lawyers didn't like doctors? Au contraire! Sure their lawyers-are-coming-after-us paranoia gets a little tiresome after awhile, but that's just a symptom of our country's political climate, in which the only way to make sure you're heard above the din is to act slightly hysterical. So I'll forgive Dr. Pho if his posts about tort "reform" are fatally one-sided.

Besides, Dr. Pho has enabled comments on Kevin, M.D., where anyone is free to say they disagree. And some of his readers do disagree, as evidenced here. Yet Dr. Pho remains unflappable, even when it's the commenters who are acting slightly hysterical. It's one reason I like Dr. Pho.

It's medicine, not politics, that's the main topic at Kevin, M.D. As a lawyer who enjoys consulting with doctors on all his tort-law cases, it's the scientific part of Dr. Pho's weblog that I find most interesting.

Recommended Reading:

1. You've got to like a doctor who has the courage to take on the drug companies and their salesmen, as Dr. Pho does here.

2. You'll find an assortment of medical topics on Kevin, M.D.--air travel and blood clots, for example, or soda and cancer risk, or urinary tract infections and thong underwear.

3. You'll even find some of Dr. Pho's own medical anecdotes on his weblog, such as his patient with a messed-up ear, or the guy with hiccups that lasted five years.

[Below the Fold: Other posts in the weblog review series.]