« February 16, 2014 - February 22, 2014 | Main | March 02, 2014 - March 08, 2014 »
February 27, 2014
UPDATED: A Better Class of Libidinous at Duke. Meet Lauren.
Unexpectedly, and going on a decade*, Duke University has been building a somewhat unruly, vaguely feral and decidedly Epicurean--let's just call it "libidinous"--reputation in the popular media.
First, it was Tom Wolfe's 2004 novel 'I Am Charlotte Simmons', exploring the hookup culture at fictional "Dupont University." Next, a national spotlight was trained on Duke's 2006 lacrosse team, and in particular an off-campus party setting off rape allegations; although the charges there were false, and eventually dropped, the scandal and its residual civil litigation painted a wild, testosterone-drenched portrait of the Duke lacrosse program and several of it players. Finally, the 2010 publication of The Duke F*ck List, a Duke woman's explicit and often hilarious review of bedroom performances by several identified Duke men, took hookup culture at Duke to painful new depths.
And now this, stuff even Tom Wolfe can't make up:
During the 2013-14 school year, a determined and apparently open and engaging Duke freshman is moonlighting in adult films to help pay tuition. She gets outed by a male student. But, to her credit, she doesn't hide. She steps up to talk about it, defending herself and humanizing herself and the porn industry. And this has made most of her critics and others involved in her story to appear small, prissy, hypocritical, bad.
There have been scads of articles on this unusual story in last two weeks.
So in case you missed it on February 14, in one of the best early stories on this, Katie Fernelius, a reporter on The Chronicle, Duke's highly-regarded 110-year-old student daily, interviewed the co-ed in "Portrait of a porn star: Duke freshman stands behind her alter-ego". Her name is "Lauren". Lauren has this more recent interview in xojane.com on February 21. And we, like many others, are beginning to admire her. Lauren has grit and soul. Hat tip to Chicago's Andrew Johnston for the idea and the xojane.com interview.
*If you go back more than 20 years, you encounter a West campus out-of-doors institution for only the most sporting student couples known as "The Order of the Chair", spoken about in hushed tones by those who participated. Those rituals merit a separate post.
Photo: Elysia Su/Duke Chronicle
Posted by JD Hull at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2014
San Antonio U.S. District Court: Texas gay marriage ban fails rational basis test.
Finding that it failed to meet the rational basis test--not "rationally related to a legitimate government interest"--a federal judge in San Antonio just declared Texas’ ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. The ban will be in place while on appeal to the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. The 48-page decision is here.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:28 PM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2014
Dan Harris: "Ten Keys For Doing Business in China. A New List".
There is no other online resource that can match Dan Harris's China Law Blog for timeliness, practicality or overall honesty about what Westerners will face in doing business in Greater China. In his Sunday post, "Ten Keys For Doing Business In China. A New List", Dan reviews a summary of China must-know cultural basics--similar in scope to primers Dan has been doing himself at CLB for almost ten years--by Asia Business professor Michael Witt appearing some time ago in Forbes. Here are two excerpts from Witt's piece, with Dan's comments in italics:
3. Take your time. Many companies want to get on the ground quickly. In one case, the CEO told his head of strategy to get China operations going within six months. Time pressure of this sort can create problems later on. It tends to result in sloppy planning and analysis. It shifts the attention from finding the right partner to finding any partner, regardless of partner fit. Moreover, it weakens your hand in negotiations. Your Chinese counterpart will know how to use your time constraints against you, and you will walk away with a worse deal. Completely agree. In my experience, there is a direct correlation between speed and quantity of mistakes. Again though, this fits into the overall need to prepare.
7. Notions of “out-of-bounds” behaviour do not necessarily match. Chinese negotiators occasionally push beyond what their Western counterparts consider appropriate bounds. For example, the representatives of a large Western firm were negotiating the distribution rights for one of their products. Their Chinese counterparts closed their initial pitch by threatening to use their political connections to prevent distribution of their products if they did not receive the rights. In another case, the Chinese party got their Western guests drunk to prevent them from being effective in negotiations the following morning (which, on the Chinese side, involved a completely different set of people). These sort of things do sometimes happen but smart companies generally have little problem in dealing with them.
Photo: Pete Stewart
Posted by JD Hull at 12:22 AM | Comments (0)