Amazon vs. North Carolina: Privacy vs. Fairness?
The New York Times explored privacy issues in the case of states wanting information about their residents' online purchases so that sales tax can be collected on those purchases. The case in point: North Carolina's request for sales data from Amazon, over which Amazon has sued, charging violations of its First Amendment rights and those of its customers.
Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, called the information collected by Amazon and other
online retailers "a honey pot for the government."
North Carolina secretary of revenue Kenneth R. Lay framed the issue as one of "fairness and equity for small businesses, bricks and mortar, corner store operations. These businesses are at a competitive disadvantage when they have to collect sales taxes that other businesses do not." He added, "It is important to know whether a book or a steak was sold, but we don't care about the title of the book or the type of steak."
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Speaking of which, the American Library Association celebrates Choose Privacy Week with a 20-minute video in which Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow and others talk about the value of privacy.
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Erotica may save the publishing industry--or at least keep it entertained in its death throes. As 
The stalled publication of 60 Years
Later: Coming Through the Rye, a novel based on J.D. Salinger's The
Catcher in the Rye, may have shifted slightly late last week when
an appeals panel, in its filing in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
in Manhattan, said U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts should reconsider
her ruling last summer halting publication by Windupbird Publishing Ltd.
of the book by Fredrik Colting, Bloomberg (via the 
Brownville, Neb., "doesn't have a bank,
discount store or Starbucks. Instead, it boasts rich artistic
experiences, historic homes, museums, quaint inns, scenic trails,"
observed 
I have lived at Sissinghurst, on and off, for the last forty-five years. For my entire conscious life it has been what I have thought of as home, even when living away, in London, or abroad. For all my attachment to other places, this has always seemed like the root. I belong to it. It is the land I have walked over, looked out over, driven through, smoked my first cigarette in, planted my first tree in, bicycled over, slept in, and lived in all my life. It is where I came to understand what a tree was, what a friend was, what a hideout was, what a landscape was, how entrancing streams were as they made their way in and out of the margins of a wood, and what solitariness, nature, and love might be.--Selected by 
Daniel Carlat's unsparing portrait of the state of American psychiatry is a profoundly depressing book. Carlat, a professor at Tufts Medical School and a practicing psychiatrist in a Boston suburb, argues in restrained but persistent terms that his profession has been degraded by too many of his colleagues who have allowed themselves to become little more than well-paid pill pushers. In this volume, aimed both at his fellow professionals and thoughtful general readers, he offers a bleak diagnosis tempered with some prescriptions aimed at promoting a new era of integrative psychiatric treatment.
