When we did this in NYC, even the police ignored it (a visit last month found them still chatting away in their cars). I live in Georgia now. But come July 1 in California… …drivers talking on their mobile phones without a hands-free device are subject to a $20 fine and a run-in with the law. The Golden State’s new traffic ordinance follows similar versions adopted in Connecticut, New Jersey, Washington state, the District of Columbia, New York and the Virgin Islands. While the...

The Times of London looked at Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein last weekend in a piece titled politicians are devouring the work of academics who explain why the carrot beats the stick. The research shows that while people claim social norms are the weakest of influences on them, the evidence indicates they are among the strongest. It’s good to see the pols picking up on that: Most of us are not robots or Vulcans. Though sane, rational beings, we often behave illogically… In...

On The Media did its program from China last week. A story on pitching brand China to the world took a fascinating tour of that nation’s emerging business, fashion and cultural media. Almost in passing, there came this important truth: BROOKE GLADSTONE: Publisher and blogger Hong Huang says that the deepest generational divide separates those born before 1980 and those born after, because of what they saw happening around them, and what they saw on TV. HONG HUANG: If you want to know [LAUGHS]...

The Advocate is out with a rare look inside the most effective pro-gay political weapon you never heard of: Gill Action, in my estimation, bears some resemblance to GOPAC, the political action committee Gingrich wielded to obtain the GOP’s landslide victories in 1994, when — along with taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in four decades — Republicans stormed state legislatures to seize power in 18 chambers. In the 2006 election, by its own account,...

NYTimes: Compared with previous years, the number of Internet users who watched videos on YouTube and other Web sites has risen only slightly. The overall number crept to about 135 million in April from 132 million in May 2007, according to comScore, an online measurement firm. But each of those users is watching far more video than before. ComScore reported that the average viewer watched 228 minutes of video in April, compared with 158 minutes in May 2007. Trying to capture a chunk of that, today...

Boston Herald: In the strongest rebuff yet of the national “pregnancy pact” story that has scandalized Gloucester, top city and school officials say there’s no evidence that nearly half of the 17 pregnant teens at Gloucester High conspired to have babies together. “We have not been able to confirm the existence of a pact,” said Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk, trying to defuse the national story on the school’s teen baby mama drama. “The information from the principal has not been verified...

From around the blogosphere. All have video… Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing has the verbatim transcript of “Filthy Words” and the FCC v Pacifica Foundation Supreme Court Case. PZ Myers, “This was a man to whom nothing was sacred, and that was how he inspired us.” Andrew Sullivan, Don’t Vote. “Some dyspepsia from newly dead George Carlin.” Ezra Klein, “the best you can say is that his untimely exit makes this place just a little bit worse.” Duncan...

Geveryl Robinson tells us in the Savannah Morning News today that she saw the Today Show this week. She didn’t like what she saw: I saw a story about 17 girls in a Gloucester, Mass., high school who made a pregnancy pact to get pregnant by any means necessary because they wanted to raise their children together. And that’s exactly what they did. Now this upsets Ms…. er, I’m thinking that in this case “Ms.” just won’t do! The appropriate honorific really has...

Douglas A. Blackmon’s “Slavery By Another Name” is reviewed today in The Boston Globe: Southern white opponents of Reconstruction and black citizenship launched a series of attacks on African-American economic and political rights. One such assault involved exploiting the portion of the 13th Amendment allowing use of unfree labor “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This subterfuge involved planters, mine owners, sheriffs, magistrates,...

As Barack Obama Fights the Smears, on this one he’s learning he’s got to do an even better job of how he fights it. Last night the News and Notes Reporters Round Table discussed the Monday incident where campaign workers barred two Muslim women from sitting behind the podium at a Detroit rally to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in media images. The campaign apologized, but CNN’s Fredericka Whitfield and the St. Petersburg Times’ Eric Deggans see potential...

If you missed my co-blogger The Talking Dog’s interview with attorney Rebecca Dick of the Washington, D.C. office of Dechert, LLP, who is representing a number of Afghan nationals currently detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, I urge you to go back and read it. Among the passages that struck me… We now know well how the Bush administration sought to redefine torture. Well it turns out that it has redefined solitary confinement, too: The Talking Dog You have been quoted recently observing...

It’s taken me a while to get around to Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the July/August Atlantic, and I have no excuse. For all its assertion that we need to be immersed in narrative and longer stretches of prose, at 4,000 words, it’s not even that lengthy an article! In it Carr says: The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was...

Slavery by Another Name – The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, was interviewed on Bill Moyers Journal tonight. He explained how vagrancy laws in the South effectively criminalized Black life so that if, for example, you were unable to prove you were employed — in a time before pay stubs — you would be subject to arrest. Broadly applied, it was almost impossible not to be in violation of some misdemeanor statute at any given time. Once arrested, the...

Douglas A. Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name – The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, was interviewed last month by Michael Slate on KPFK, Los Angeles. From the transcript of that interview: Michael Slate: At the end of your book you say you feel that that period of time between the betrayal of reconstruction, the destruction of reconstruction, and World War 2 and maybe even beyond World War 2 and into the 1950s, you talk about how that should not be...

Insider Advantage has people talking Georgia this morning: A New InsiderAdvantage / PollPosition survey conducted June 18 of registered likely voters in the November presidential contest shows Sen. John McCain leading Sen. Barack Obama by a single point in Georgia, making the race in Georgia a statistical tie. Libertarian Bob Barr, a former Republican Congressman from Georgia, received 6 percent of the vote. The telephone survey of 408 registered likely voters is weighted for age, race, gender, and...

The Bicycle Ride Across Georgia: The Bicycle Ride Across Georgia (BRAG) is an annual road-cycling tour across the US state of Georgia. It began in 1980 as an offshoot of RAGBRAI. The route covers approximately 400 miles over 7 days with options for longer distances. Mid-week, the tour stays two nights in one town allowing riders to either rest or ride a century with lesser mile options. Rest stops are every 8-15 miles and snacks and drinks are provided to registered riders. An estimated 1,800 people...

Outside the Beltway’s Robert Prather notes a shift: The creationists deserve a few props here. Since the Dover loss they’ve switched strategies away from claiming that ID is science and are instead focusing on “academic freedom”. That the concept of academic freedom doesn’t generally apply at the elementary and secondary levels seems to be of no consequence. The Louisiana legislature has passed, by a veto-proof majority, a bill that protects the “academic freedom” of teachers to...

SilentPatriot is pointing to Progress Illinois’ examination of Obama’s 50-state strategy to completely redraw the electoral map for November: Using projections from fivethirtyeight.com’s remarkably accurate Poblano, PI proves that moderate boosts in three key demographics — African-Americans, Latinos and 18-24 year olds — could result in huge electoral hauls; somewhere on the order of 300+ electoral votes. If it sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. But the numbers don’t...

Ongoing Associated Press actions have us all talking about Fair Use. I thought I’d use the opportunity to say a word about Free Use. In a podcast of the Princeton University/Microsoft Intellectual Property Conference panel on Creativity and I.P. Law: How Intellectual Property Law Fosters or Hinders Creative Work from May 2006, Larry Lessig discussed the demise of Free Use. The freedom to read – in a library, from a borrowed book, or from a book you bought – is a “free use.”...

The AP sure has swatted a hornet’s nest. I’m as indignant as the rest of the blogosphere at the notion that we’d have to pay to license 5-word quotations (and they reserve the right to terminate the license), but the fact is they’re not going to enforce that agreement — they said as much over and over again — possibly taking chief critic Jeff Jarvis’ one last bit of advice before he got on his plane. (Would that the RIAA were as responsive, right Michael?) But...

The NYTimes picks up where we left off Friday: …the news association convened a meeting of its executives at which it decided to suspend its efforts to challenge blogs until it creates a more thoughtful standard. “We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said. Mr. Kennedy said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group,...

I’m on St. Simons Island, GA; a far more conservative beach community than the gay haunts (Fire Island, Provincetown) of my younger years. I am interested to read that the Cape Cod National Seashore is teaming up with local officials this summer for a “public education” approach to the soaring number of citations for debauchery in Cape Cod’s dunes. Middle age finds me in agreement with the new Provincetown police chief Jeff Jaran that it’s “not acceptable, decent,...

Jim Kennedy, VP and Director of Strategy for AP, writes to clarify and reassure bloggers in response to my earlier post: AP wants to fill in some facts and perspective on its recent actions with the Drudge Retort, and also reassure those in the blogosphere about AP’s view of these situations. Yes, indeed, we are trying to protect our intellectual property online, as most news and content creators are around the world. But our interests in that regard extend only to instances that go beyond...

UPDATE: AP’s Jim Kennedy emails: The Associated Press encourages the engagement of bloggers — large and small — in the news conversation of the day… Bloggers are an indispensable part of the new ecosystem, but… There are many ways to inspire conversation about the news without misappropriating the content of original creators, whether they are the AP or fellow bloggers. Full text here. Headline corrected for clarity (added “Retort”). Original post begins here… Worth...

Theda Skocpol asks, Will White Feminists Speak up for Michelle Obama? The attacks gathering on her are scurrilous, profoundly sexist and racist. Will prominent white feminists and female pundits and officials — including Congressional Republican women — speak up forcefully against slurs on Michelle Obama? It will be a strong test of their good faith. Do they care about fairness to all women involved in public life, or are they just whining for Hillary or maneuvering for her voters? Pam...