Just Friends
The idea of an online social network is simple, even obvious—Kirkpatrick cites an article from 1968 expounding the idea long before it was technologically feasible. Such networks were already up and running—MySpace was the biggest—when Zuckerberg started Facebook. A user has a profile page on which he posts whatever information about himself he thinks might interest people with whom he has—or would like to have—a relationship. READ MORE >>
Just Friends
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World By David Kirkpatrick (Simon & Schuster, 372 pp., $26) READ MORE >>
1937, 2010
Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court By Jeff Shesol (W.W. Norton, 656 pp., $27.95) READ MORE >>
The Race Against Race
How I Became a Keynesian
In Defense of Looseness
At the end of June, the Supreme Court, in a case called District of Columbia v. Heller, invalidated the District's ban on the private ownership of pistols. It did so in the name of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. The decision was the most noteworthy of the Court's recent term. It is questionable in both method and result, and it is evidence that the Supreme Court, in deciding constitutional cases, exercises a freewheeling discretion strongly flavored with ideology. READ MORE >>
Convictions
The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial By James Q. Whitman (Yale University Press, 276 pp., $40) I. READ MORE >>
Enlightened Despot
Richard A. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for theSeventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of ChicagoLaw School. The Judge in a Democracy By Aharon Barak (Princeton University Press, 332 pp., $29.95) READ MORE >>
Wire Trap
THE REVELATION BY The New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) is conducting a secret program of electronic surveillance outside the framework of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has sparked a hot debate in the press and in the blogosphere. But there is something odd about the debate: It is aridly legal. Civil libertarians contend that the program is illegal, even unconstitutional; some want President Bush impeached for breaking the law. The administration and its defenders have responded that the program is perfectly legal; if it does violate FISA (the admini READ MORE >>
