SPOILER ALERT. I'm about to reference the ending of a venerable short story and a movie adaptation from the Golden Age of Hollywood. If you wish to read or view either of these in innocence, don't proceed further. Old Hollywood had a rule that the bad guys never win. The evildoers always get their comeuppance. After all, if people wanted to see evil prosper, they didn't have to go to the cinema for that, they could just stick with the morning newspaper. Anyway, the rule resulted in innovative re-writes to certain adapted literary works. This may never have been more jarring than in the case of Witness for the Prosecution, a 1925 Agatha Christie short story that had a complicated publication history over the next three decades and that became a movie only in 1957. ONE FINAL WARNING. TURN BACK OR LEARN THAT ... The basic plot of the short story is that of a criminal trial portrayed through the eyes of a sympathetic defense attorney, played in the movie by Charles L...
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Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, has said that there are only nine news stories, constantly re-written. Every year at about this time I like to check the newspaper with his list in mind, to see if he is right. I'll start with his wording unmodified by examples. 1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE 2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE 3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL 4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX 5. EXPERT WARNS OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY 6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY 7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING 8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS 9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL I surveyed the news on one day (a few days back as it happens). Just by convenience, these headlines are all from January 19th. Well, actually, I cheated a little with one of them, but I'll let you dear reader do the work of figuring out which one that is. Without further ado.... 1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE Catastrophic flo...
The Hon. Jed. S. Rakoff, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, has written a fascinating essay for the New York Review of Books entitled "The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted?" The title explains the theme well enough. I'll just quote one bit of what he says. He observes that the Dept. of Justice has argued that it couldn't secure convictions in many cases of apparent fraud by top bank officials because it is difficult to prove the officials knew what their underlings were doing. This inspires Rakoff to cite a recent statement of the doctrine of "willful blindness." "Many criminal statutes require proof that a defendant acted knowingly or willfully, and courts applying the doctrine of willful blindness hold that defendants cannot escape the reach of these statutes by deliberately shielding themselves from clear evidence of critical facts that are strongly suggested by the c...
Rebekah Brooks -- the lass who looks like Hermione after she magically borrows Ron's hair -- was once the head of The Sun, whence she moved in June 2009 to News International, and in both capacities was considered a right-hand woman of Rupert Murdoch. She resigned that latter job two years and one month after she took it, under pressure of the phone-hacking scandal that has brought her to this. Now, she's on trial. An Aussie friend of mine calls it the trial of the century. Well ... only one-seventh of this century has thus far passed us by. But we are seeing the trailing end of a news story that has been appalling and amusing in turns, and both in epic proportions. Here's a link to the curtain-opening piece from The Guardian .