By • May 29,2008

Battle Royale

As James mentioned last week, Battle Royale is a fine example of modern Japanese cinema. And here comes the AV Club with tons more info on the film. One quibble,...

By • May 29,2008

Copying without plagiarizing

Ever since I got into the journalism biz–way back in the halcyon days of 2004–I’ve noticed an interesting dilemma: Journalists at large, national outlets will steal ideas and other people’s...

By • May 29,2008

Is Freedom Antidemocratic?

That’s a heavily rhetorical question that I might not live up to in this post, but I’ll try anyway for the purposes of casting a sharp, counterintuitive argument in the...

By • May 29,2008

Mechanical Animals: Still Animals

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to...

By • May 28,2008

Double-Dipping

One of the more deplorable practices of the motion picture industry is that of “double-dipping” on DVDs–in other words, releasing a regular edition DVD and following it up three months...