- Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama from Nobel winner Derek Walcott. And unsurprisingly, the Senator reads Walcott.
- What is Art For?: For the founders, intellectual property was a great privilege; copyrights and patents were primarily meant to serve, in Madison’s words, as “encouragements to literary works and ingen ious discoveries.” By extending copyright retroactively, Hyde told me, the C.T.E.A. negated the logic of incentive: Mickey Mouse can’t be invented twice.
- Filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad talks about honesty in art: Follow your inner instincts. Because, as Mr.Wyeth himself once said, “If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.”
- Don’t Mind Your Language…: A post in defense of a living, evolving language by the inimitable Stephen Fry.