Archive for the 'Firm Absurdity' Category

Hard Proof that My Criminal Investigation Outline Was a Waste of .00000002 Gigabytes
Monday, September 24th, 2007

In case any lawyers/law students/devotees of the law persuasion still read this, I figured this piece might peak your interest. Ahh the bar exam. There is no escape.

“In The Valley of Elah”
Thursday, September 13th, 2007

In 2006, director Paul Haggis struck Oscar gold with Crash, a unique brand of hot-button tragedy porn that reduced race in America to a glamorized, sanctimonious mess. So it’s only logical that his next Academy Award-ready ensemble cast film would tackle Iraq. Bu this time, though the buttons are hot and the hand is heavy, [...]

“Sicko”: Even the Billionaires Will Die Someday
Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

It was a bizarre merging of worlds at the New York SiCKO premiere, a theater packed with media A-listers and twenty-something billionaires watching tales of healthcare woe elbow-to-elbow with activists in matching slogan t-shirts. “Could it have been any more didactic?” sniffed one media patriciate as chanting nurses paraded through the lobby during the closing [...]

Jeweled Life
Monday, March 12th, 2007

If you’re seeking a little inspiration on a chilly Monday morning, check out my piece today (second one down the page) in the New York Post. It’s about a woman who left her lucrative law career to pursue her true passion (pet topic of mine? How’d you guess). Now she runs her own thriving jewelry [...]

Sad
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

This is truly, profoundly sad. It’s sad that this message board exists; sad that these “best and brightest” of America’s law schools (even writing this cracks me up) choose to spend their time harassing their peers instead of actually contributing something useful to humanity; sad that the site’s founders encourage racist and misogynistic posts to [...]

Depression From Down Under
Monday, January 15th, 2007

The following was sent to me by a reader in Australia. It’s a set of exerpts from a “reflective journal” he and his fellow associates were required to keep during their first few months as newly-crowned lawyers (you have to love these perky HR schemes meant to “encourage reflection on the learning derived from your [...]

More Media Fun
Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007

I wrote this for Eat The Press a while ago, in the center of the gaping vortex that swallows all time and energy around Christmas and New Years, so I figured I’d resurrect it after the madness had passed. The contrast between the tone and angle of the two Times articles is pretty jarring. On [...]

And It Just Keeps On Going
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007

Thanks to several readers for sending me this article in today’s New York Post. Yup, more and more of us over-educated astronomically-paid chattel are fleeing midtown highrises en masse, in a desperate exodus to just about anywhere that isn’t a fluorescent-lit cubicle. The sad part of it all is that the hordes of slavering [...]

The Burnout Myth
Thursday, November 30th, 2006

It’s another week of Societal Armageddon in the media, with New York Magazine pontificating about the science of burnout and Time chiding us for obsessing over chemical weapons attacks and avian flu while chainsmoking unfiltered Camels and shoving triple bacon cheeseburgers down our gullets. These articles, intended to pull back another onion layer of our [...]

Hilarity
Monday, October 2nd, 2006

It’s just too fantastic. Living manifestations of the absurdity that is the American (and British) legal systems. Here we have the sordid bastard child of technology and modern sociology, sacrificed to the gods of hand-held communications systems, wrapped in a lovely tort law ribbon. I’ve written about Blackberries before, that hot superiority injection they shoot [...]