You Might Like… a Few Diverting Pieces on Rösti, Toes, Atwood, Footnotes, Flutebox, and More

This is a post in a series to appear occasionally, setting out some articles, videos, podcasts and the like that contributors at Slaw are enjoying and that you might find interesting. The articles 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.

The Guardian – How to cook the perfect rösti – Felicity Cloake – Pronouncing it is half the struggle. The other half is whether or not to parboil.

Jotly – Rate everything – A delightful and fairly convincing spoof of all the social media startups: “Jotly is only useful so far in coastal cities…”. The video works particularly well. (But wasn’t there once a real site or app called Jotly? Or does it just seem like that because the satirists have chosen well?)

Times Higher Education – Economical with the actualié – Fred Inglis – This retired professor “excoriates the application of a bankrupt neoliberal ideology to the academy, and calls for scholars to rise up and free the truth from the market’s clutches.” I’ll say. He does it with perfervid language that at times makes you think he’s foaming at the mouth and biting the carpet. At other times it reminds you of Conrad Black’s meccano prose. Worth reading as a good rant, though.

Oscillatory Thoughts – Why you can’t individually control your toes – Bradley Voytek – A neuroscientist goes into the whole business of connections between your brain and your body parts and how you can enlarge the “toe” area of your motor cortex. Chimps still have us beat, though.

New York Times – Will the E-Book Kill the Footnote – Alexandra Horowitz – The writer reviews a book by Christopher Brand, Going, Going, Gone, and though not at all certain the e-book will be that dangerous, concludes: “Should footnotes fully disappear, I would grieve their loss. I do not find it disagreeable to bend my nose south and find further information where it lands.” Spoken as though by a denizen of legal academe, where footnotes crowd out… notes.

The Guardian – The road to Ustopia – Margaret Atwood – By the Great Fords! the poetess talks about why some of her work is or is not science fiction. Her imagined worlds are “ustopias,” a combination of “utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite.”

mervynpeake.org – Mervyn Peake the illustrator – 1911-1968 – A marvellous collection of drawings by the writer most known for Gormenghast, perhaps. Lovely depictions of characters from Bleak House, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Treasure Island…

Economic Policy Institute: The State of Working America – When Income Grows, Who Gains? – This is an interactive chart showing US income over time and how it’s distributed across the population. Sliders let you control start and end dates of the analysis. Curiously, it would appear that the rich are getting richer. Much much richer.

The Awl – The Vicious Trademark Battle Over ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ – Maria Bustillos – The WWII “Keep Calm” images have been hot lately. But like dormant bombs from that conflict, unexpected blasts of a legal nature have occurred. This raises the question of what you can copyright that’s not of your own making.

YouTube – Nathan ‘Flutebox’ Lee – Lee uses a flute to beatbox. What would Mozart have said? (“Oh Mr. Lee” perhaps.)