Prufrock: In Defense of Personal Property, How Chess Became a Science, and the Divine Dante

Reviews and News:

The man who made chess into a science: “By some chess historians’ accounts, we are just passing the 150th anniversary of that achievement: it was in 1866 that Steinitz won a 14-game match in London against the man then generally regarded as the world’s best, the German Adolf Anderssen.”

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In defense of personal property: Timothy and Christina Sandefur’s Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st-Century America offers “a well-researched, thoroughly documented study of Takings Clause abuses at local levels throughout America. First published before Kelo, their new edition examines the case while strenuously defending constitutional property protections. For anyone interested in property ownership, eminent domain, or the 5th Amendment, the book—from two experienced litigators with the Goldwater Institute—is a useful tool.”

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Four recent examples show why no one trusts the media: The New York Times claims Rick Perry doesn’t understand what an Energy Secretary does, The Washington Post mocks people for praying and claims a Yale computer scientist is an “anti-intellectual,” and Jim Acosta.

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Samuel Beckett after the Nobel: “Two principal conflicts shaped Beckett’s life in the aftermath of the Nobel Prize. First, the newly sharpened drama of making a life between public and private spheres – between the solitary pleasures of listening to Haydn piano sonatas in Ussy, his ‘hole in the Marne mud’, and posing, mute and mysterious, in Paris or London for yet another craggy portrait by John Minihan or Jane Bown. Second, the conflict between Beckett’s sense that his work had reached a standstill (‘resolutions colon zero stop period hopes colon zero stop Beckett’, as he told The Times of his plans for the new year in 1984), and the practical evidence from letter to letter of how fertile an old age he was in fact enjoying.”

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The divine Dante: “The Divine Comedy‘s vision of the world has an intellectual depth and integrity that has yet to be exhausted even after 700 years of serious scholarship. Dante’s is a story about the changing of his own life, and his hope for a regeneration of the corrupt, bellicose, and chaotic Christendom of his day. But Dante’s poem has changed many lives over the centuries, and encountering the world of his vision—which is at once intellectual and passionate, dramatic and yet sculpted with a fine logic—has led innumerable converts to the Roman Catholic church. In this studious, authoritative, but reductive new biography, Marco Santagata seeks to fill in the literal details of Dante’s life as the poet shuttles between triumphs and disappointments on the road to the completion of his great poem.”

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Will the best Sherlock Holmes please stand up?

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Essay of the Day:

Over at Backchannel, Jessi Hempel takes us behind the scenes at BitTorrent’s bizarre collapse:

“Last April, a pair of cousins named Bob Delamar and Jeremy Johnson became co-CEOs of BitTorrent. Delamar was a bearded Canadian Japanophile in his early forties; Johnson a network engineer from San Diego. Through an unusual financial arrangement, they represented a four-person group that had recently come to own a controlling stake in the company, and they had a plan to turn BitTorrent into, as Delamar was fond of saying publicly, ‘the next Netflix.’

“BitTorrent had already tried to be the next Netflix, starting long before Netflix had become the next Netflix. The company was founded in 2004 by Bram Cohen, inventor of the open-source protocol that lent the startup its name, and Ashwin Navin. BitTorrent — the protocol — was a genius way to transmit large amounts of information over the net by breaking it into small chunks, sending it through a peer-to-peer network, and reassembling it. BitTorrent — the company — got started on the assumption that Cohen was brilliant. He’d invented one of the web’s most fundamental tools, and surely there was a business to be made from it.

“But from the start, BitTorrent had a branding problem — pirates used it to share movies illegally, making it the Napster of entertainment. Because the protocol was open-source, BitTorrent (the company) couldn’t stop the pirates. For 12 years, BitTorrent’s investors, executives and founders attempted to figure out many money-making strategies, including both enterprise software and entertainment businesses, while convincing us all that, sure, people might use the BitTorrent protocol to conduct illegal activity, but BitTorrent was just a tool — a really great tool you can use for really great things!

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“But transforming this technology into any kind of business has proved elusive. By last spring, BitTorrent had already endeavored to become a media company, twice. There was BitTorrent Entertainment Network, launched in 2007, which was a storefront for movies and music that made no money and shut down a year later. And then there was the BitTorrent Bundle, launched in 2013, which was a competitor to iTunes and Amazon that let artists distribute their work directly to fans at a fraction the cost. In 2014, the company even announced plans to produce its own original series, a scifi show called Children of the Machine. But by early the next year, BitTorrent had given up on this strategy, too.

“Some startups are born lucky. By the chance of their timing, their technology, or the individuals who helm them, they experience Facebook-size success. Others fail quickly. There is luck in this, too — in an immediate, concise conclusion. Far more startups, having raised funding on the merits of an idea and a team, plod along for years or even decades, constantly casting about for the idea or customer or partnership that will transform them. Their investors are patient, and then exhausted, and then checked out, and then impatient. Their executives change, and then change again. The founders leave, or they hang on in hopes the company they conceived will somehow eventually prove itself. They are zombie startups.

“Such is the case with BitTorrent. It has remained a technology in search of a business for a dozen years. Then last year, Delamar and Johnson arrived with plans to save it once and for all. Instead, they squandered millions on failed schemes, putting the company on course for collapse.”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Polish church

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Poem: Benjamin Myers, “Field”

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