After the Prestige: A Postmodern Analysis of Penn and Teller

By mocking the magic community and revealing the secret behind some of their tricks, Penn and Teller perform a kind of parodic and post-modern “anti-magic.” Penn and Teller display an artful use of rhetoric; in exposing the secrets and shortcomings of conjuring, they are revolutionizing the way people think about both the art of magic and the magic community. Individuals such as Penn and Teller may use parody to subvert the hegemonic interpretations. However, we also know that it is difficult to bring down a system while operating within that system. Thus, this article explores the way Penn and Teller are challenging the metanarrative of the magic community, using several of the duo’s more popular illusions as examples for analysis. Ultimately, this paper should help us gain a better understanding of the way parody can be used to challenge hegemonic conceptions, and the limitations of this type of rhetorical approach

"Meddling with Royal Hearts": Interiority and Privanza (1598-1643)

This paper studies how seventeenth-century writers in Spain elaborated different conceptions of interiority in connection with the intimacy they imagined between the king and his favorite or privado. Authors in the days of Lerma, Uceda and Olivares portrayed the relation between king and privado in terms that generally relied on inherited notions of ideal friendship, which nonetheless would clash with concerns about the ubiquity of deceit, simulation and dissimulation at the court. This seemed to set boundaries to the unlimited transparency and trust expected between friends. I will address three issues. First, the way writers imagine the favorite’s access to the king’s secrets, as well as the nature of these secrets. Second, the space of intimacy and shared loneliness in which they conceive the friendship of king and privado to materialize. Third, the transformations that take place in the favorite’s interiority as a result of his relation with the king and his position at the court

National Security Pedagogy: The Role of Simulations

This article challenges the dominant pedagogical assumptions in the legal academy. It begins by briefly considering the state of the field of national security, noting the rapid expansion in employment and the breadth of related positions that have been created post-9/11. It considers, in the process, how the legal academy has, as an institutional matter, responded to the demand. Part III examines traditional legal pedagogy, grounding the discussion in studies initiated by the American Bar Association, the Carnegie Foundation, and others. It suggests that using the law-writ-large as a starting point for those interested in national security law is a mistake. Instead, it makes more sense to work backwards from the skills most essential in this area of the law. The article then proposes six pedagogical goals that serve to distinguish national security law: (1) understanding the law as applied, (2) dealing with factual chaos and uncertainty, (3) obtaining critical distance—including, inter alia, when not to give legal advice, (4) developing nontraditional written and oral communication skills, (5) exhibiting leadership, integrity, and good judgment in a high-stakes, highly-charged environment, and (6) creating continued opportunities for self-learning. Equally important to the exercise of each of these skills is the ability to integrate them in the course of performance. These goals, and the subsidiary points they cover, are neither conclusive nor exclusive. Many of them incorporate skills that all lawyers should have—such as the ability to handle pressure, knowing how to modulate the mode and content of communications depending upon the circumstances, and managing ego, personality, and subordination. To the extent that they are overlooked by mainstream legal education, however, and present in a unique manner in national security law, they underscore the importance of more careful consideration of the skills required in this particular field. Having proposed a pedagogical approach, the article turns in Part IV to the question of how effective traditional law school teaching is in helping to students reach these goals. Doctrinal and experiential courses both prove important. The problem is that in national security law, the way in which these have become manifest often falls short of accomplishing the six pedagogical aims. Gaps left in doctrinal course are not adequately covered by devices typically adopted in the experiential realm, even as clinics, externships, and moot court competitions are in many ways ill-suited to national security. The article thus proposes in Part V a new model for national security legal education, based on innovations currently underway at Georgetown Law. NSL Sim 2.0 adapts a doctrinal course to the special needs of national security. Course design is preceded by careful regulatory, statutory, and Constitutional analysis, paired with policy considerations. The course takes advantage of new and emerging technologies to immerse students in a multi-day, real-world exercise, which forces students to deal with an information-rich environment, rapidly changing facts, and abbreviated timelines. It points to a new model of legal education that advances students in the pedagogical goals identified above, while complementing, rather than supplanting, the critical intellectual discourse that underlies the value of higher legal education

Ono: an open platform for social robotics

In recent times, the focal point of research in robotics has shifted from industrial ro- bots toward robots that interact with humans in an intuitive and safe manner. This evolution has resulted in the subfield of social robotics, which pertains to robots that function in a human environment and that can communicate with humans in an int- uitive way, e.g. with facial expressions. Social robots have the potential to impact many different aspects of our lives, but one particularly promising application is the use of robots in therapy, such as the treatment of children with autism. Unfortunately, many of the existing social robots are neither suited for practical use in therapy nor for large scale studies, mainly because they are expensive, one-of-a-kind robots that are hard to modify to suit a specific need. We created Ono, a social robotics platform, to tackle these issues. Ono is composed entirely from off-the-shelf components and cheap materials, and can be built at a local FabLab at the fraction of the cost of other robots. Ono is also entirely open source and the modular design further encourages modification and reuse of parts of the platform