Been resting and reading as I get over this damn cold. Despite how bad it it, it's not even in the same league as November's...
What James Donovan Did After the Bridge of Spies (New York Times)
Finally got around to watching the 2015 film and found it as remarkable as I suspected. James B. Donovan was certainly one of the more interesting figures from 20th century America:
"'Both my father and Castro are actually great talkers,' said John Donovan, now 71, in a phone interview. 'But my father was not willing to put up with nonsense. He would play along with Castro’s various pronouncements on all kinds of things, but then when it came to the critical points, he would insist on things being realistic and settled.'"
Why Entrepreneurs Start Companies Rather Than Join Them (Steve Blank)
An interesting discussion on Hegde & Tumlinson's decades-long research.
On my end, my entrepreneurial activity has been driven by:
1. Seizing the freedom to create things that would otherwise bug me if they were left uncreated.
2. Making a claim about a better way of doing business and proving that claim correct. I left my last job due to an institutional myopia about where innovation begins, and the best way to cultivate and extend it. I was in a group in located in a medical school and I argued that my group needed to be able to engage outside clients outside the field of medicine to develop and mature the technologies that would be valuable in medical contexts. That approach was shot down and I left to restart Audacious Software to do what I said we should do. Judging by the mountain of work on my plate, and the fact that my former unit no longer exists, I feel like I've proven my claim. And the folks to whom I made the original argument at the medical school are solid clients with whom I enjoy a good working relationship.
3. People take you much more seriously if you're running your own business as opposed to being a cog in someone else's enterprise.
Entrepreneurism isn't all candy and roses either. The major downside is best summed up by Uncle Ben:
"With great power comes great responsibility."
I have a lot of freedom as a self-employed business owner, but I'm also responsible for an order of magnitude more stuff than I was as an employee. For some folks, that trade is worth it, but it's certainly not for everyone. I was very fortunate to grow up in a household where my father was self-employed, so those lessons were imprinted on me early on.
Beyond All Warnings: The Radical Assault on Truth in the Law (Quillette)
AND
In Defence of Critical Legal Theory: A Reply to Andrew Kelman (Quillette)
The first article challenges whether Critical Legal Theory embedded in the justice system is a positive development and whether interpreting the law to challenge existing power structures is an appropriate application of the law, which should be applied logically and neutrally. The second article highlights the indeterminacy of legal language, which often displays a lack of concrete unambiguous language that can be applied neutrally (that is, all parties agree on the meanings of the relevant legal phrases). Given that the law itself is often underspecified, individuals (in the form of judges) decide what the law means and this provides the relevance of Critical Legal Theory (according to the second author).
Given my previous work on the "incompleteness" of copyright law (in a Gödelian sense), when applied to the H.P. Lovecraft copyrights, I'm a bit more sympathetic to the second author's criticism of the first author's legal utopianism (that the law is unambigious).
Cubs score nine in wild eighth inning for 14-10 comeback win against Braves (Chicago Tribune)
Some astonishing small-ball was played today.
Image credit: Promotional material from "Bridge of Spies" (2015).
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