Possibly you are a fan of tennis but did not go to Flushing Meadows for more than 100 hours of the recently concluded U.S. Open, as HL did. If so, this post is for you. Among the things prominent tennis press and commentators uniformly stated pre-tournament was that the Open would be: […]
HL has recently asked himself “self, how can lefties like you beatify lawyers who represent Gitmo prisoners pro bono but sneer at other sisters and brothers at the bar (sometimes they are the same) for taking money from Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey and Asia Argento to defend them. […]
How many times have we heard Republican candidates for elective office invoke Ronald Reagan as their hero, inspiration and justification for a policy that Reagan never backed, would not have supported, or clearly had opposed? […]
HL 73 “Reparations in the Theatre World” commented on current conventions and unwritten but ignored, at peril, Rules that prevail in the legitimate theatrical and cinema worlds. The Rules, de facto, constitute an informal regime of reparations for discrimination and other injustice done to racial minorities in those industries. […]
Results of the first NBC/WSJ national poll of Americans who say they will vote in next year’s primary elections confirm that Democrats in all 50 states have learned what New Yorkers have known for quite awhile: Kirsten Gillibrand and Bill de Blasio are zeroes. They each failed to gain one percent support in the poll where Biden, Warren, Sanders, Harris and Buttigieg registered 26%, 19%, 13%, 13% and 7% respectively. […]
The June 11, 2019 edition of the PBS “Nightly Business Report” was startling because the 1, 2, 3, 4 top stories were all antitrust. Here be it and see it. Uno: Ten state attorneys general sue to block the Sprint/T-Mobile merger. Dos: A federal judge may unscramble the CVS/Aetna merger consummated in 2018. Tres: Trump wonders aloud about the competitive effects of the proposed merger of United Technologies and Raytheon. Cuatro: The House Judiciary Committee began its much-heralded antitrust oversight hearings, squarely targeting Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. […]
The Williams College Class of 1969 held a Reunion Seminar on June 8, 2019 (exactly 50 years after graduating on June 8, 1969) with the subject of reexamining two books that the class had been asked to read and discuss during orientation week in September 1965. They were "The Image" by Kenneth Boulding and "Science and Human Values " by Jacob Bronowski . The seminar panel comprised Laurence McCullough , Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics, Baylor College of Medicine, Robert Kandel, a prominent real property lawyer/developer , former New York City Commissioner of Economic Development and currently Chair of Berkshire Farm and Services for Youth in Canaan, New York and Lloyd (all Williams '69). With some minor reference to the two works, Lloyd's comments [...]
In HL’s Grand Central Station neighborhood hipster-doofi line up for five buck Matcha Wellness Lattes at cashless Bluestone Lane kiosks and Birkenstock-shod elder hippies tender $20 – plastic only – for a snack size soup and avocado toast at the Great Northern Deli. While on line with them HL suppresses an impulse to lecture and instead waits his turn, places an order and refuses it when the proffer of cash is rejected. Our own private uncivil disobedience. A variation has HL offer the “cards” in his phone and watch digital wallets – also not accepted – but that only demonstrates that these particular cashless merchants are also clueless. […]
In one of the most consequential antitrust rulings in a half-century, Apple v. Pepper, SCOTUS on Monday allowed iPhone app purchasers to sue Apple for overcharges on apps designed and priced by developers (not Apple) but sold on the App Store. The decision was 5 to 4, with Justice Kavanaugh not merely siding with the liberal quartet of Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan, but writing a highly pro-consumer majority opinion that the right-wing dissenting foursome (who thought they had a quintet) bitterly complained was hopelessly and irrationally liberal. […]
Abigail Disney, Walt’s great niece and Roy’s granddaughter, stole the show last weekend, topping even Disney Studio’s Avengers: Endgame $1.2 billion box office for favorable mentions. Her criticism of Disney’s 2018 compensation of $65 million to CEO Bob Iger, because that was “1424 times the median pay of a Disney worker” also earned her another rare trifecta (see HL 70) of leading stories in the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. […]
