Good reading

Two recent great reads. First off, a recent review of the new Leaving Reality Behind: etoy Vs. Etoys.com & other battles to control cyberspace that might just read better than the book itself. The book depicts a conflict between a group of European artists who saw the Internet as a massive platform for performance art, and the vc-backed high profile big-brand-wannabe Etoys.com, which, as many of us may remember became a poster child for overreaching dot-com mania. The battle over who owned the name (first conceived by the Euros) revealed so much of what went wrong in the latest New Economy.

Second great read: an article in the new issue of Fortune Small Business on an ambitious 32-year-old who has started a scrappy tobacco company. I don’t and will never endorse this evil weed. But I do emphatically recommend this great story, which shows how the spirit of enterprise never dies, even while it kills folks.