Technology and the Public Interest
Books, essays, and commentary from John Palfrey
Essays
Notes from AI Action Summit in Delhi, India, February 2026
Reflections on AI, governance, and the public interest from the AI Action Summit in Delhi.
Read essayConcord Free Public Library 150th Anniversary Celebration
Remarks on libraries, civic institutions, and the enduring importance of public knowledge.
Read essayInvesting in the Arts—in Chicago and Beyond
Thoughts on philanthropy, culture, and why investing in the arts matters for public life.
Read essayCommentary from John Palfrey
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School Spirit
An alternate version of “The Game”: Harvard vs. Yale via Alexa.
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Apple Loses In Latest Round with Does
The Court of Appeal in California (Sixth Appellate District) has ruled in favor of Jason O’Grady in his dispute with Apple Computer. It’s a pretty resounding opinion (linked here (PDF)), covering a lot of ground, including trade secret, the Stored Communications Act, and various other issues related to whether a corporation can stop a publisher…
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A Neighborhood Watch for the Kenyan Parliament
One of Berkman’s all-time great graduates, Ory Okolloh, has launched Mzalendo, which is watching over the Kenyan parliament. Subscribe to their RSS feed; bound to tell important stories, and to be an important story itself. They are “a volunteer run project whose mission is to ‘keep an eye on the Kenyan Parliament.’ The project was…
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Happy coffee memories
John Bracken (Media SITREP), off the grid for 2 weeks, has used his absence to encourage a guest blogger, Yaucono, who writes of happy coffee memories: “Yaucono kept me awake, aware, soothed, and rooted in my culture and values in the midst of the most unsettling experience of my young life – not just the…
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Bloggers as Celebrities: Too Cool for School?
The organizers of a conference I’m just leaving mentioned to me a curious fact: they invited 6 prominent bloggers — not to be named here (and I am certainly not including myself in this category) — to attend the event, called The Leaders Project. Not a single one responded, not even to RSVP “no.” I…
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How Digital Natives Experience News
The process of experiencing news of those Born Digital – the Digital Natives — is famously different from the generations they succeed. DNs don’t read the New York Times or their local paper cover-to-cover over coffee in the morning, nor return home to hear the news read by Walter Cronkhite or Dan Rather (then discuss…
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Circumventing Internet filtering
At the Berkman Center, we don’t work on making tools that allow the circumvention of the Internet filtering that we study (along with collaborators at the University of Cambridge, Oxford Internet Institute, and the University of Toronto). But our partners at the University of Toronto do. Much anticipated: the announcement of Psiphon. Here’s the new…
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The Leaders Project at White Oak
Former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, along with his colleague Doug Wilson, has been hosting a very interesting “successor generation” event called The Leaders Project for the past several years. The sixth iteration of the event is hosted at a remarkable estate in northeast Florida called White Oak, as it has been for five of…
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Emotional Legal Design
Urs Gasser, prepping to head out to a Gruter Institute event at Squaw Valley (tough life), wants to know if you agree: “I suggest that in-depth and cross-disciplinary research in the field of law & emotion will soon be complemented by a discussion about what we might call ’emotional legal design’, i.e., a discourse about…
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Latest badware report
Our project that names names of code that users should look out for, StopBadware, has released its latest instance of an application that falls outside of the scope of our guidelines. We think computer users should beware of the Jessica Simpson Screensaver (in case the name didn’t give it away to you already). The idea…
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Re-Reading Negroponte, Being Digital (1995)
In preparing for the final lecture of a two-day seminar that Urs Gasser and I are teaching here at the University of St. Gallen, I was going back through one of the books that got me interested in Internet law in the first place — Nicholas Negroponte’s seminal book in atom form, Being Digital (1995).…