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“If it is fortunate, a legal generation has a Tenth Justice. I invoke the phrase not as it is sometimes used, to denominate the solicitor general, but rather as it was used to refer to Learned Hand, the famed appellate judge who never warmed a seat on the Supreme Court. By dint of relentless merit, these individuals earn legal authority akin to that wielded by the Nine. In Richard A. Posner, our generation has its Learned Hand, its Henry Friendly. In complex times, we can take comfort in the simple fact of his existence.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/books/review/richard-a-posners-reflections-on-judging.html?pagewanted=2&ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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“No cocktail (and this includes the martini) gets people as worked up about methodology as the old-fashioned. And that’s probably because the two major approaches really are quite different. One is starkly minimalist, prescribing nothing more than sugar, whiskey and bitters — maybe a few teardrops’ worth of water, maybe a twist of orange or lemon to finish it off. Like Hayworth, it’s streamlined, it’s today (even if it is one of the oldest cocktails on record). It’s certainly not the old-fashioned I was taught to make at a bar in small-town Vermont in the early 1990s. There, the first time a customer ordered the drink from me, I skulked over to the manager to ask what to do. She plonked a sugar cube, a slice of orange and a cherry in a glass, dug what looked like a small nightstick out of a drawer, handed it to me as if I had any idea what to do with it and told me to add whiskey, Angostura bitters and ice. I did figure out what to do with the muddler, and that drink — the sweet and fruity, eager-to-please, raised among the grasshoppers, strictly from corn, boisterous version — instantly became my old-fashioned.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/the-great-old-fashioned-debate.html?ref=todayspaper

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In the late 1800s, elite colleges admitted students from private schools based on entrance exams in Latin and Greek. State schools let in almost everyone who graduated from high schools certified by the universities’ professors. It wasn’t until private colleges opened their admissions to public school students that anyone saw the need for an application. There were more students than the schools could serve, and administrators noted with dismay that selecting based on academic merit alone dangerously increased the percentage of Jewish students.

In 1919, Columbia University unveiled the first modern college application. The eight-page form requested, among other things, a photograph, “religious affiliation,” and “mother’s maiden name in full.”

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/magazine/who-made-that-college-application.html?ref=todayspaper

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The Cold War era I grew up in was a world of insulated walls, both geopolitical and economic, so the pace of change was slower — you could work for the same company for 30 years — and because bosses had fewer alternatives, unions had greater leverage. The result was a middle class built on something called a high-wage or a decent-wage medium-skilled job, and the benefits that went with it.

The proliferation of such jobs meant that many people could lead a middle-class lifestyle — with less education and more security — because they didn’t have to compete so directly with either a computer or a machine that could do their jobs faster and better (by far the biggest source of job churn) or against an Indian or Chinese who would do their jobs cheaper. And by a middle-class lifestyle, I don’t mean just scraping by. I mean having status: enough money to buy a house, enjoy some leisure and offer your kids the opportunity to do better than you.

But thanks to the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution that has unfolded over the last two decades — which is rapidly and radically transforming how knowledge and information are generated, disseminated and collaborated on to create value — “the high-wage, medium-skilled job is over,” says Stefanie Sanford, the chief of global policy and advocacy for the College Board. The only high-wage jobs that will support the kind of middle-class lifestyle of old will be high-skilled ones, requiring a commitment to rigorous education, adaptability and innovation, she added.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/friedman-why-i-still-support-obamacare.html?ref=todayspaper

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To compete for the best millennial talent, companies are having to change in fundamental ways. Goldman Sachs, for example, recently announced its intention to improve the work environment of its junior bankers by having them work less. Of course, that flies in the face of Wall Street tradition, in which new recruits often work late into the night and for entire weekends.

Goldman made the change partly because it was losing millennials to start-ups. But start-ups typically offer less pay and equally long hours, which suggests that providing more time off isn’t the only answer. If corporate cultures don’t align with the transparency, free flow of information, and inclusiveness that millennials highly value — and that are also essential for learning and successful innovation — the competitiveness of many established businesses will suffer.

Millennials are becoming more aware of their rising worth. Coupling their ability to learn quickly with their insistence on having a say, they pack a powerful punch. But rather than complaining, it’s time to embrace millennials for what they can offer, to add experience from older workers to the mix, and to watch innovation explode.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/jobs/embracing-the-millennials-mind-set-at-work.html?ref=todayspaper

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As certain high school seniors work meticulously this month to finish their early applications to colleges, some may not realize that comments they casually make online could negatively affect their prospects. In fact, new research from Kaplan Test Prep, the service owned by the Washington Post Company, suggests that online scrutiny of college hopefuls is growing.

Of 381 college admissions officers who answered a Kaplan telephone questionnaire this year, 31 percent said they had visited an applicant’s Facebook or other personal social media page to learn more about them — a five-percentage-point increase from last year. More crucially for those trying to get into college, 30 percent of the admissions officers said they had discovered information online that had negatively affected an applicant’s prospects.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/business/they-loved-your-gpa-then-they-saw-your-tweets.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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Umpires are already more closely acquainted with pitch-tracking technology than is often assumed. “We currently use technology for both evaluation purposes and training purposes,” says MLB spokesman Mike Teevan. “All umpires receive a computerized breakdown of their plate performances, including calls they got right and calls they missed.”

The Zone Evaluation system, as the league’s PITCHf/x-based balls-and-strikes review heuristic has been dubbed, is one component of a comprehensive umpire assessment program. The league claims an average ZE umpire accuracy rate of 95 percent or higher, although certain pitches on which the umpire — but not PITCHf/x — is blocked by the catcher are excluded from the count. Even so, with an average of 156 called pitches per game (between both teams), a 95 percent success rate suggests that eight incorrect calls still slip through, too many not to notice. The explanation, contrary to what you may have heard from hecklers, isn’t that umpires are incompetent. It’s that their job is impossible for human beings to do perfectly.

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– http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9940495/ben-lindbergh-possibility-machines-replacing-umpires

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In a paper published on Friday in the journal PLOS One, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands announced that they had found strikingly similar versions in languages scattered across five continents, suggesting that “Huh?” is a universal word.

The study, conducted by Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, closely examined variations of the word — defined as “a simple syllable with a low-front central vowel, glottal onset consonant, if any, and questioning intonation” — in 10 languages, including Dutch, Icelandic, Mandarin Chinese, the West African Siwu and the Australian aboriginal Murrinh-Patha.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/arts/that-syllable-everyone-recognizes.html?ref=todayspaper

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CLASSES MY TOP-TIER LAW SCHOOL SHOULD HAVE OFFERED AS WARNINGS ABOUT THE PROFESSION.

BY E. NOAKES

Cutting and Pasting Legal Lingo

Explaining Business Associations to the People Who Are Running Them

4 A.M. Word Processing and the Law

Ethics of Conspicuous Consumption

Forwarding E-mails: Theory and Practice: Seminar

Arbitrary-Deadline Negotiation Strategies

Crying Quietly: Clinic

Jeans-Friday Advocacy Workshop

Cutting and Pasting II: Plural to Singular

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– http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/classes-my-top-tier-law-school-should-have-offered-as-warnings-about-the-profession?fb_action_ids=794091507178&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_ref=.UnrY_bnE3QM.like&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%22794091507178%22%3A10150285213609903%7D&action_type_map=%7B%22794091507178%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%7B%22794091507178%22%3A%22.UnrY_bnE3QM.like%22%7D

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“Humans are good at a lot of things, like producing objects of great taste and beauty. But consistency is not one of them. In fact, growing concerns about inconsistency and badly brewed coffee, engendered by manual brewing techniques—particularly in busy shops, where harried baristas often can’t take the necessary care to properly brew each cup—are the reason even some of the most elite shops have begun, over the past couple of years, to reconsider fully analog brewing. The renewed interest in consistency has resulted in the emergence of multi-thousand-dollar hot-water dispensers like Marco’s Über Boiler, which essentially dispense a given amount of water at a particular temperature for a certain amount of time, along with flashy, expensive (and, frankly, mediocre) new automated machines, like the fifteen-thousand-dollar Alpha Dominche Steampunk, which brews up to four cups of coffee simultaneously. Some shops, like Portland’s Heart Coffee, are returning to automated batch brewing, albeit highly tuned by humans, to achieve more consistency.”

– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/11/better-brewing-through-technology.html

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