Judging law reviews

There’s a great discussion going on over at the Empirical Legal Studies blog, where legal scholars are thinking about the merits, problems and functions of law reviews. This forum was prompted by research by Jason Nance and Dylan Steinberg, “The Law Review Article Selection Process: Results from a National Study.” Many of the points apply [...]

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The hero trap

Jane Espenson, a screenwriter with a blog, reveals to The New Republic the secret to selling sci-fi.
Her hypothesis is that if you want to sell fantastical fiction like Harry Potter to a mass audience, the best story has nothing to do with the elements of fantasy. It’s all about a Chosen One who has a [...]

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How to copy me

Over the past couple of weeks, a few accidental trackback alerts have revealed a blogger has been copying content from Thought Capital – and quite a few other blogs – without attribution.
Tut tut.
As noted by the Creative Commons license on the sidebar:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 [...]

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We love writers because they tell how we might see things

And they use pretty words to do it.
Take this, for example:
The whole point of the “soundbite“ used to be to mine one nugget of gold from a longer point, to boil it down to its essence. But we’ve boiled over as a culture, and there’s nothing left in the pot. We’re not just going for [...]

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Science writing and publishing round-up

Today at ScienceBlogs there are a few posts of interest to science writers:
The Daily Transcript’s post, History and analysis of scientific publishing, comments on a interesting book with an overly long title, In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing.
Recent posts to Adventures in Ethics and Science discuss science [...]

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