The Tortellini

Apology for sporadic blog posts

I'm feeling guilty for not having posted anything here in a week... It's not for lack of material--Lord knows that tort reformers never sleep. But I have a confession to make: I really hate blogging. I know, it's the wave of the future, yadda yadda yadda. But I am a working journalist, and I guess I'm still wedded to the Old Media. I like books, magazine articles, newspaper stories, things that we used to call "long-form" journalism. Successful blogging, for the most part, entails little more than noting some other journalist's actual work--you know, real reporting--and making snarky comments about it in the hopes that someday, someone will actually pay you to be snarky on TV.  (The blogging itself is also a big money loser, the $103 I've made from Google ads notwithstanding.)

Personally, I'd much rather be doing the actual reporting than the snarking. So that's what I've been doing of late--reporting for magazines and books for which, unlike blogging, I get paid--as well as doing my laundry, calling my mom, and watering my carrot seeds. Being a good blogger requires sitting at a desk for long periods of time or Blackberry enslavement, wrecking your eyesight reading all the other blogs, and then posting at 3 a.m. I guess I'd just rather tend to the carrots...Anyway, I appreciate all of you who bear with me and check in periodically for my intermittent ramblings.

By the way, for any northeast Pennsylvania readers, I'll be speaking and signing copies of my book at the University of Scranton tomorrow night at 7:30. Details and related op-ed here.

BP's Browne Over and Out

Allowing your company to blow up 15 workers apparently won't get you fired; having sex with a man from an escort service, though, and off with your head...

The New Yorker on the CSI Effect

Jeffrey Toobin has an interesting, if somewhat disappointing, story this week in the New Yorker on the "CSI effect" on forensic science in criminal investigations. Most notable about it is the continued resistance by the courts and the forensic science establishment itself to banning hair and fibre evidence in criminal cases, even though the "science" is what one observer calls "faith-based" and has sent untold numbers of innocent people to prison and occasionally death row. The story isn't online, but hey, if you pick up a hard copy of the magazine, you can also read yet another Obama profile after finishing up with Toobin. ...

And this is only what they admit to doing!

From the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog today: New research suggests lawyers who work by billable hours (i.e., most defense lawyers)  routinely pad their bills and unethically double-bill clients. I will be waiting with baited breath for Cardozo law prof and Manhattan Institute ethics "expert" Lester Brickman, who never misses a chance to bash plaintiff lawyers for alleged contingency fee abuses, to express outrage over this..