Stanford Center for Internet and Society

David Brooks in today's NYT: "The question then becomes: What shapes moral emotions in the first place? The answer has long been evolution, but in recent years there’s an increasing appreciation that evolution isn’t just about competition. It’s also about cooperation within groups. Like bees, humans have long lived or died based on their ability to divide labor, help each other and stand together in the face of common threats. Many of our moral emotions and intuitions reflect that history. We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.

Adam Cohen in the 4/1 NYT: "The economic downturn is hitting the legal world hard. American Lawyer is calling it “the fire this time” and warning that big firms may be hurtling toward “a paradigm-shifting, blood-in-the-suites” future. The Law Shucks blog has a “layoff tracker,” and it is grim reading. Top firms are rapidly thinning their ranks, and several — including Heller Ehrman, a venerable 500-plus-lawyer firm founded in 1890 — have closed.

The employment pains of the legal elite may not elicit a lot of sympathy in the broader context of the recession, but a lot of hard-working lawyers have been blindsided, including young associates who are suddenly finding themselves with six-figure student-loan debts and no source of income.

Leading firms have historically avoided mass layoffs, concerned that their reputations would take a hit. But some have been putting those inhibitions aside, perhaps calculating that the stigma of pushing out their colleagues has faded. Law firm managers and bar associations should be looking for more creative ways to deal with the hard times — like reducing pay for both partners and associates to save jobs, as a few firms have begun doing.

The silver lining, if there is one, is that the legal world may be inspired to draw blueprints for the 21st century.

Very cool -- just learned that Mediate.com, the the premiere dispute resolution information portal, has opened its archive of video interviews for April.

Matt Harding, NPR's Weekend Edition today: "I believe globalization is forcing our brains to evolve.

I've had the privilege to see a lot more of the world than anyone my age could reasonably hope to. A few years ago, on a backpacking trip, I made a video of myself dancing terribly in exotic locations. I put it on my web site. Some friends started passing it around, and soon millions of people had watched it. I was offered sponsorship to continue my accidental vocation, and since then I've made two more videos that include 70 countries on all seven continents. A lot of people wanted to dance along with me, so I started inviting them to join in everywhere I went, from Toronto to Tokyo to Timbuktu.

Here's what I can report back: People want to feel connected to each other. They want to be heard and seen, and they're curious to hear and see others from places far away. I share that impulse. It's part of what drives me to travel. But it's constantly at odds with another impulse, which is to reduce and contain my exposure to a world that's way too big for me to comprehend.

Interesting/humbling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDLIwlzkgY

Supposedly this is a year old (though I'd never seen it before) so the numbers are even bigger now.

Daniel Schorr on NPR: "The president tends to seek conflict resolution rather than drama. He has been compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, confronted with an economic crisis. But Roosevelt closed the banks to avoid a run on them. Obama, on the other hand, joined in on a rescue effort for the ailing financial institutions. FDR enlisted 8.5 million of the unemployed into a federal workforce. The incumbent sponsors a complicated stimulus, or recovery package, intended to work through the states and localities.

Faced with Democratic objections to elements in his 10-year budget, he invites suggestions for alternatives. And he doesn't appear to be perturbed when House Republican John Boehner calls his budget "the most irresponsible piece of legislation" he has seen.

There is a sense that Obama is employing his skills as a community organizer, bent on conflict resolution, seeking the common ground. Tuesday night he said, "When each of us looks beyond our own short-term interest to the wider set of obligations we have toward each other, that's when we succeed."

Thomas Vinciguerra in the NYT: "So what, beyond pushing buttons, do these men — as all Kirk chair owners appear to be — do with the most conspicuous piece of furniture in the room?

Some watch TV in theirs, or simply loll, and some seem to find the chair an empowering place from which to deal with others. “When we have a little family powwow — I have four children — I sit in it to lay down the law,” said Mr. Boyd, the auto parts manager.

And most, of course, indulge their fantasies, imagining doing battle with Klingons and otherwise cruising the cosmos. “Sitting in it,” said Mr. Bradshaw, the graphic designer, “I find myself striking an action pose quite unconsciously.”

To his regret, he must strike those poses in his home office. “My wife is not big on it,” he said. “I’ve actually been threatened with divorce if it comes into the living room.”

Mark Danner in the NY Review of Books: "We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase "War on Terror"—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was "a wartime president"—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead..."

Peggy Orenstein the NYT Magazine: '...a study published in 2007 in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication suggested that hanging onto old friends via Facebook may alleviate feelings of isolation for students whose transition to campus life had proved rocky. Evidently they took comfort in knowing that “Dylan is drinking Peets.”

That may well be, but something is drowned in that virtual coffee cup — an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness...'

David Boren, senator from Oklahoma from 1979 to 1994, in the Post two days ago: "History demonstrates that bipartisanship is not an impractical, romantic notion. But it doesn't happen automatically: It requires support and structure...

Many have been urging the president to give up on his efforts to work across party lines. Those people forget that bipartisanship has been critical to our nation's success. The Marshall Plan and the doctrine of containment that served as a consistent blueprint for victory in the Cold War would not have been possible without bipartisan cooperation. Major progress in civil rights was the result of bipartisan efforts.