You Might Like…

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles that contributors at Slaw are reading and that you might find interesting. These tend to be longer than blog posts and shorter than books, just right for that stolen half hour on the weekend. It’s also likely that most of them won’t be about law — just right for etc.

Please let us have your recommendations for what we and our readers might like.

kev/null – Can We Ever Digitally Organize Our Friends? – Kevin Cheng – As Google + has us going in circles, the author confronts some structural problems that arise when tech meets real people.

London Review of Books – Swing for the Fences – David Runciman – Why do sports teams do so well in home games?

New Library World – Electronic books: a call for effective business models [abstract only] – Rebecca Schroeder and Tom Wright – Libraries have typically purchased materials “just in case”. Ebooks may prove to be a game-changer, because it is now very simple to buy “just in time”. Unfortunately, there are lots of business and licensing issues to be resolved before this can take place. 

Bloomberg Businessweek – Cyber Weapons: The New Arms Race – Michael Riley and Ashlee Vance – The Pentagon, the IMF, Google, and others have been hacked. It’s war out there, and a cyber-weapons industry is exploding to arm the combatants.

Wired Magazine – Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics – Jason Tanz – The big computer companies would do well to have hackers inside rather than outside the tent.

New York Times SundayReview – Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables – Mark Bittman – The cautious case for changing the American diet via tax policy.

Google Think Quarterly – Sci-Fi That Foretold The Future – Allison Mooney – “They seemed far-fetched on screen, but these movie moments fast became non-fiction.”

Vanity Fair – The War for Catch-22 – Tracy Daugherty – “In an adaptation from his Heller biography, Tracy Daugherty recalls the tortured eight-year genesis of Catch-22 and its ultimate triumph.”

TheObserver – Online Commenting: How the internet created an age of rage – Tim Adams – About the trolls and anonymity and what they’ve done to online discourse.

The Atlantic – Fiction 2011 – multiple authors – The Atlantic’s annual offering of great fiction.