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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Some Basic Facts about the Berkman Center
A new group of (utterly wonderful) interns has arrived at the Berkman Center, asking lots of questions about what the place is about. I met with a big group of them, working on a few projects I’m involved with, this afternoon. There’s also a reporter who has been working on a story about the Center,…
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Susan Rabiner, Thinking Like Your Editor
As I’ve been gearing up to write a new book, I’ve been thinking about how to do it better this time — continuous improvement and all that. Some fairly obvious observations are on my mind: stronger argument, a more compelling narrative, less repetitive, probably shorter, and one big-picture idea,* below the rest of the post.…
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Danner: Taming Multiplicity in a Post-Print Era
Prof. Richard Danner of Duke Law School is giving a truly inspiring lecture today at Harvard about libraries and legal information. He has grounded his talk in a lecture by Morris Cohen, a former Harvard Law School library director and professor (later, he had both jobs at Yale as well), about the “multiplicity” of legal…
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Upcoming Lecture: Richard Danner on Open Access (4/29 at 12:30 p.m. at Harvard)
I’m just thrilled that Richard Danner has agreed to give a major lecture on the Harvard campus about open access on April 29, 2010. As a rookie law library director, I’ve asked many people in the profession about the leaders in the field, and roads inevitably lead to Danner, among a small handful of others…
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Night at the Cambridge School Committee
At the Cambridge City Hall, the School Committee is meeting about its budget for the coming year. There’s not a seat to be had in the Sullivan Chamber. People are clustered in the antechamber, watching the proceedings on a TV monitor in the hallway. The School Committee is expected to approve the proposed $137.5 million…
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Google in China
I’m looking forward to a day of watching the fallout from the Google-China-HK announcement yesterday. I give Google an enormous amount of credit for the approach that they are taking; it’s a worthy effort to meet what they consider their human rights obligations while seeking to engage in the China market, both of which are…
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Joel Reidenberg: Transparent Citizens and the Rule of Law
Prof. Joel Reidenberg (Fordham Law; director of the Center on Law and Information Policy) starts out a luncheon talk at the Berkman Center’s Law Lab with a provocative opening theme: Transparency challenges the very existence of the Rule of Law. Some hasty/live-blogged notes follow: As a practical matter, in the cloud era, we’ve lost the…
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Julie Cohen: Configuring the Networked Self
At the Berkman Center, we are hearing a preview of key elements of Prof. Julie Cohen‘s forthcoming book, Configuring the Networked Self. Some hasty live-blog notes follow: Prof. Cohen tells us that there are two disconnects that she starts with: 1) there are lots of invocations of “freedom” being floated around, but many of the…
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Reader Privacy Event at UNC-Chapel Hill
Anne Klinefelter, the beloved law library director at UNC-Chapel Hill (you should hear her dean introduce her; really!), is hosting a Data Privacy Day event on reader privacy. She makes the case in her opening panel remarks that, if we wish to translate library practices with respect to privacy into a digital world, we need…
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Sahara Byrne: Parents, Kids and Online Safety
Prof. Sahara Byrne, of the communications department at Cornell, is the Berkman Center‘s lunch series speaker today. Prof. Byrne studies responses to Internet safety techniques. She’s interested in the “recipes for disaster,” such as when parents love a given safety technique and kids hate it. She’s a believer in psychological reactance theory: that when kids…
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Research Confidential and Surveying Bloggers
In our research methods seminar this evening at the Berkman Center, we got into a spirited conversation about the challenges of surveying bloggers. In this seminar, we’ve been working primarily from a text called Research Confidential, edited by Eszter Hargittai (who happens to be my co-teacher in this experimental class, taught concurrently, and by video-conference,…