UM-Flint Thompson Library

Fired up from summer workshops about social bookmarking and other Library 2.0 stuff, I have been experimenting with bookmarking and tagging the resources of the UM-Flint Thompson Library. It's slow-going at the moment, because I'm still ironing out procedures, but I have posted a few pages of bookmarked resources using linkrolls (see this, for example).

In France, the intellectuals still believe that the real victims of crime and criminality are the criminals themselves, at least if a long article that appeared in Le Monde earlier this month is anything to go by. Entitled “Blind Sentences,” it came furnished with a large cartoon of a blindfolded judge, bloodily squashing small people on the bench in front of him with his gavel.

Having devoured the Sherlock Holmes stories as a boy, I did what their author hoped and graduated to his much finer historical novels. The best of these, The White Company, appeared in 1890; it describes the recruitment and deployment of a detachment of Hampshire archers during the reign of King Edward III, a period that, as Arthur Conan Doyle phrased it, “constituted the greatest epoch in English History—an epoch when both the French and the Scottish kings were prisoners in London.”

NOTHING gets a journalist's attention like a subpoena. While authoritarian regimes silence critics by murdering or jailing them, journalists (and other critics) in the United States face gentler, but still effective, intimidation: libel lawsuits. Over the last few years, radical Islamists have tried silencing reporters, scholars and citizens by suing them for defamation, often successfully. But recent legal cases in California, Massachusetts and Minnesota suggest that the tactic may finally be backfiring, at least in the United States, if not in Britain, where libel laws overwhelmingly favor plaintiffs. The American lawsuits' outcomes represent victories for the free expression and public participation that the First Amendment guarantees.

Written to “teach mythology not as a study but as a relaxation from study,” these ageless volumes span the ages: from the Olympus of Zeus and the Valhalla of Thor, to the Round Table of King Arthur and the escapades of Robin Hood.