Posts by nancyscola
“Knife Fight,” Reviewed
Here’s the one where I play Tribeca Film Festival-going movie critic for The Atlantic. I’m a sucker for things where political staffers are in the spotlight, but Knife Fight, starring Rob Lowe as political consultant Paul Turner and co-written by long-time Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, lets the aides get away with making the easiest of decisions. It seems like the moment’s right for a really sexy film about, say, the impact of political money on governing. It would have been a thrill to see Lowe chew his way through a script like that. But instead, we watch while otherwise perfect politicians get caught with their pants down. That’s some...
Read More“Exposing” ALEC
Belatedly, here’s a pointer to a recent piece for The Atlantic on the anatomy of the long online and offline organizing campaign to draw support away from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative legislative network better known as ALEC. Hint: it didn’t start with Trayvon Martin.
Read MoreThe NYU Expansion End Game
On the local reporting front, newish from me and the folks at Capital: an interview with Alicia Hurley, the university’s point person on its proposed expansion, in which she argues that some people on and around its Village campus simply aren’t willing to wrap their minds around the details of the plan.
Read MoreA Domain of Our Own: Tussling Over “.nyc”
"Mark Twain famously advised ‘Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.’ Well now we can make more New York addresses—just on the internet!" – New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn After years and years of discussion, New York City is on the cusp of applying for its very own top-level domain, the aptly-named ".nyc." There are geopolitical implications: the creation of these generic TLDs, as they’re called, has put focus on the role that ICANN, a California-based non-profit, plays in the governance of the Internet. And there’s something very New York City specific to it all, too, in that in...
Read More“Our Social-Media Amnesia”
The gist of my recent piece for Reuters: We’re tweeting more than 340 million times a day, conducting a robust public conversation on Twitter. Yet, even on Twitter’s sixth birthday today, we still can’t track it, can’t search it, can’t access our archives. There is no public record. Is that really so much to ask? Hope you might give it a read.
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