Sunday, April 30, 2006

PTN Book Club: Anansi Boys

This may be our most popular selection yet.

Amber: "Unlike the rather plodding, dark American Gods, Anansi Boys has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments (making me reassess whether the laughs in Good Omens came from Gaiman or Pratchett)."

Karl: "I would venture that the style of the book is often Pythonesque (or prehaps Gilliamesque, a la Time Bandits)."

Donna: "Anansi Boys is funny."

Zubon: "The destruction of Earth was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to Arthur Dent, since he lost everything immediately and all at once. There was no lingering suffering as his life was shredded one bit at a time. He would have become an annoying character, wandering about Islington wishing for tea while Ford Prefect acted strangely on the side. Fat Charlie is that tedious, earthbound Arthur Dent."

Tom: "I was struck by Gaiman’s ability to occasionally drop something beautiful and profound into his narration without losing the zany tone and pace of his story. "

"Pistols or swords."

The former EIC of the Yale Law Journal appears to have challenged another student to a duel.

PTN Book Club: Amber on Anansi Boys

I put off getting a copy of Anansi Boys because of how underwhelming I found Neil Gaiman's last novel, American Gods. This resulted in my having to pay cover price at Barnes & Nobel after realizing that the library copies were checked out and it was too late to order it from Amazon. Anansi Boys may not have provided $30 worth of enjoyment, but it was still the most pleasant of the books we've read so far.

We start with Fat Charlie Nancy. Fat Charlie isn't fat, or at least he isn't anymore, but when he was younger, his father gave him the nickname and it stuck. Fat Charlie's father had a knack for naming things, along with an uncanny ability to embarrass his son and a way with the ladies. Fat Charlie hasn't seen his father in years, and is preparing to wed Rosie, an English do-gooder, when he gets some bad news: his dad is dead. He flies from London to Florida and arrives just in time to help bury his father and to find out from an old neighbor that he has a long-lost brother. When he drunkenly invokes the mysterious sibling, all hell breaks loose.

You see, Fat Charlie's father was a god, and even dead gods have plenty of enemies. This goes double for trickster gods like Anansi, the spider deity that was Charlie's father.

Unlike the rather plodding, dark American Gods, Anansi Boys has plenty of laugh-out-loud moments (making me reassess whether the laughs in Good Omens came from Gaiman or Pratchett). And unlike On Beauty, Anansi Boys has well-drawn, subtle black
characters. Interestingly, no black character is ever described as such; other characters are instead differentiated from them by their whiteness, like Grahame Coats, who looks like "an albino ferret in an expensive suit."

I flew through Anansi Boys, but some stand-out bits were Gaiman's explanation that everyone has their own life song (this is the tune we sing in the shower, and the words are usually too embarrassing for public consumption), the descriptions of Rosie's mum, a desiccated Eartha Kitt-lookalike who holds a grudge against Charlie for trying to eat her wax fruit, and the amusing response of some islanders who can't believe that anyone would take a holiday with nothing but a lime as luggage. The only part that rung false was the easy escape of Charlie's brother from the avian emissaries of a rival god. I've read The Dark Half. Birds will tear you up.

Anansi Boys deserves the success it achieved (it premiered at #1 on the NYT bestseller list), and it provided a solid $10.95 worth of reading pleasure. Recommended.

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Why not "Oftom"?

Katie Holmes is now Kate Holmes, according to Tom Cruise:
Tom explains, "Katie is a young girl's name. Her name is Kate now – she's a child-bearing woman."
Shudder. (h/t)

Friday, April 28, 2006

Attorney in trouble for blogging

A litigation associate on loan to the San Franscisco prosecutor's office got in hot water for some blog postings he made about a pending case. The associate, a Boalt grad, subsequently left Keker & Van Nest to write musicals. (h/t)

The moral of the story? Don't call your opposing counsel "chicken" or refer to her with obscenities or discuss inadmissible evidence on your blog. And if you really want to work in theatre, don't go to law school.

Thursday, April 27, 2006

Recovering Objectivist relapses

Angelina Jolie is Dagny Taggart.

UPDATE: David Bernstein thinks Dagny should be played by 56-year-old Sigourney Weaver or 48-year-old Sharon Stone. Such appreciation of older actresses is admirable (if utterly divorced from the reality of Hollywood), but Dagny Taggart and John Galt are thirtysomethings during the novel. Why reduce the film's potential audience by casting older actors with a narrower appeal?

Regardless of his being a decade too senior, though, the only choice for d'Anconia is Antonio Banderas.

Achilles/Patroclus: The First Slash?

Recently a fanfic writer tried to sell her unauthorized Star Wars novel on Amazon. The reactions of authors and publishers were negative. An interesting discussion on fanfic in the literary world ensued. The most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is essentially a novel-length fanfic about Little Women. Any interest in making it a book club selection?

I really wanted to write a note about the legal status of fanfic, but it's already been done.

Don't forget: Anansi Boys is this month's book. Email links to your thoughts on it by Sunday.

UPDATE: If you are actually looking for Achilles/Patroclus, maybe this link would be helpful.

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

You oughta be in pictures

I borrowed this book from Steve on Monday and read it on my way back to Clerksville from D.C. (where the job hunt goes on). Like Eugene Volokh, I found it to be a gripping read. I usually don't care too much for nonfiction, but this has a great storyline in addition to providing tons of weird information about the legal institution of trial by combat in France.

In brief: two friends, vassals of the same liege lord, become enemies as the lower-born but politically suave Le Gris rises in society and obtains the advantages to which the more aristocratic Carrouges felt he was due. When the down-on-his-luck Carrouges remarries, his beautiful young bride catches the eye of his adversary. She later claims that Le Gris found her alone and raped her. He denies it, and his friend and liege supports him. Carrouges believes his wife's claim and demands trial by combat. Surprisingly, the king and parlement of Paris grant his request. Three lives hang in the balance: Le Gris's, Carrouges's, and Marguerite's, who watches from a black-draped scafford and will be burned at the stake for the crime of swearing a false claim if Le Gris triumphs. The battle is intense, starting with a joust, progressing to axes and swords, and continues until a dagger decides the case. Will justice be done? Was Marguerite raped by Le Gris, or is this just another attempt by Carrouges to bring down his rival? Could it be a case of mistaken identity?

I'm thinking this should be a Studio Canal production with Gerard Depardieu as Carrouges, Jean Reno as Le Gris, and Eva Green as Marguerite. Who should be cast in the inevitable American remake?

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Suggestion Box

Is this blog not pink enough? Is the authorial voice insufficiently feminine? Do my posts about Supreme Court clerks not drip with the required ratio of envy to hero-worship? Tell me how you really feel.

Harvard Plagiarism: Undergrad Edition

Wunderkind chick-lit author exposed as a plagiarist. Metafilter is there.

(Previous posts on HLS's plagiarism woes here, here, and here.)

Monday, April 24, 2006

Come on, sugar.

We finished the first season of Veronica Mars last night, and more threads were left hanging than mysteries were solved. What happened to Logan's note? What was in the secret message pen? Where did the rest of Lily's duct stash go? And why did Abel Koontz know about Kane and V's mom?

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Incognita?

I had a very strange experience today at a Mexican restaurant. The waitress was acting very weird and giggly and gave me this very significant look when she thanked us for coming. The only way I can explain it is that she was acting like she thought I was someone else. Is there some D.C. or Latina celebrity who looks like me?

Friday, April 21, 2006

Happiness is a warm gun

One blogger asks: what if gun safety was taught like sex ed?
  • allow everyone to own a gun (even more, they'd require it: gunlessness is an abomination), but they'd insist that kids could never, ever take them out of their holster, sheath or gun rack
  • it would be illegal to expose your weapon or even talk about it
  • exposing a gun on TV would outrage viewers, who would deluge the network with complaining phone calls
  • blanks, trigger locks, and even safeties would be forbidden
  • there would be accidental discharges every night in every teenager's home, but no one would ever talk about it
  • it would be a shameful sin to go off by yourself and practice shooting at targets
  • the only acceptable use would be to kill something, although it would be OK to miss if you were sincerely trying to kill something
  • most hunters would be desperately hoping to miss every time they went hunting, and would try to contrive situations in which they could fire their guns without actually hitting anything
Is this a useful analogy? If not, why not?

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Some things never change

Should you send your daughter to Tulane? Tyler Cowen helpfully points out that "the renaissance ends at the edge of campus." That was always true; one of my main turnoffs from Tulane when I visited it in high school was the length and seriousness of the crime report in the student newspaper.

Lyrics.ch: RIP

As an exercise in community, tell us your favorite song lyric. Mine may be the second stanza of School Night, although that song deserves some kind of prize for greatest disparity in lyrical quality within a single piece; everything after that is terrible. Another contender might be this bit from Shy:
the door opens, the room winces
the housekeeper comes in without a warning
i squint at the muscular motel light
and say, hey good morning
as she jumps, her keys jingle
and she leaves as quickly as she came in
i roll over and taste the pillow with my grin

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Who's Who? III

By request, an updated list of the OT 2006 Supreme Court clerks. Has Alito hired yet?

I fell behind on posting about the Elect because nobody was sending me any information about them; if you have gossip, photos, or other hot information about any of the clerks who have not yet been profiled, email me! I will post on them as soon as I have a full Justice's worth of profiles. I especially need info on the non-HLS clerks.

Kennedy:
  1. Dave Foster (Harvard '05/Kozinski)
  2. Mark Yohalem (Harvard '05/Rymer)
  3. Eric Murphy (Chicago '05/Wilkinson)
  4. Lisa Marshall (Yale '05/Leval)
Souter:
  1. David Han (Harvard '05/Boudin)
  2. Daniel Tenny (Michigan '05/Tatel)
  3. Bryan Leach (Yale '05/Cabranes)
  4. Boris Bershteyn (Yale '04/Cabranes)
Scalia:
  1. Dan Bress (UVA '05/Wilkinson '05-'06)
  2. Louis A. Chaiten (Northwestern '98/Sutton '03-'04)
  3. Joshua Lipshutz (Stanford '05/Kozinski '05-'06)
  4. Hashim Mooppan (Harvard '05/Luttigator '05-'06) source
Stevens:
  1. Nick Bagley (NYU '05/Tatel)
  2. Chad Golder (Yale '05/Garland)
  3. Jamal Greene (Yale '05/Guidomaniac)
  4. Lauren Sudeall (Harvard '05/Bleeding Reinhardt) source
Ginsburg:
  1. Kate Andrias (Yale '04/Bleeding Reinhardt '04-'05)
  2. Scott Hershovitz (Yale '04/W. Fletcher '04-'05)
  3. Daphna Renan (Yale '04/Edwards '04-'05)
  4. Arun Subramanian (Columbia '04/Jacobs '04-'05/G. Lynch '05-'06) source
Breyer:
  1. Stephen Shackleford (Harvard '05/Boudin) source
  2. Thiru Vignarajah (Harvard '05/Calabresi)
  3. Tacy Flint (Chicago '04/'05, Posner)
  4. Jaren Casazza (Columbia '04/Jacobs '04-'05/Wood '05-'06)
Thomas:
  1. John Adams (UVA '03/Sentelle-tubby '03-'04)
  2. David Bragdon (UVA '02/S. Williams '02-'03)
  3. Brandt Leibe (Yale '05/Luttigator '05-'06) source
  4. Adam Conrad (Georgia '05/Sentelle '05-'06)
Roberts:
  1. George Hicks (Harvard '05/Brown)
  2. Felicia Ellsworth (Chicago '05/Boudin)
  3. Paul Nathanson (Harvard '04/Niemeyer/Silberman)
  4. Keenan Kmiec (Boalt '04/Alito/Sentelle)
Alito:
  1. Mike Lee (BYU '97/Alito) source
  2. Chris Paolella (Harvard '99/Alito)
  3. Matthew A. Schwartz (Columbia '03/Alito)
  4. Gordon D. Todd (UVA '00/Beam) source

Roberts Completes OT 2006 Clerk Hiring

The last two OT 2006 Roberts clerks are Paul Nathanson (Harvard '04,
Niemeyer, Silberman) and Keenan Kmiec (Boalt '04, Alito, Sentelle).
Full profiles to come. Post gossip in the comments or email me!

Heard it through the grapevine

A rumor is going around that more OT 2006 Supreme Court clerks have been hired (Roberts was the name I heard). Can anyone validate?

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Motion for fist fight

Via Orin Kerr, evidence that Montana lawyers have a cowboy mentality.

The case apparently involves drunken brawl in which a larger man jumped a smaller man in the presence of a crowd of onlookers. The smaller man then stabbed his attacker 13 times, killing him. Defense counsel, angered by what he perceived as the prosecution's contention that the smaller man should have stuck to fists instead of using a knife to defend himself, apparently wanted to put the opposing attorneys to the test and challenged them to a similar fist fight. The judge was not amused.

Homosociality, boo!

This post takes a long look at male homosocial interactions and isn't happy with what it sees. Do you think that this dynamic affects your own relationships? What are the homosocial norms for females? The Caroline in the City anecdote could just as easily been scripted for three women; lots of women espouse similar post-relationship standards, and few feel that it's necessary to inform their exes of them, since the relevant parties they wish to discourage are their female friends.

Smells Like Teen Spirit

If this gets really popular, could it have a Fourth Amendment impact?

Monday, April 17, 2006

The Bluebook makes me blue

Ann Althouse is right; the new Bluebook rules for blog citation are horrible.

Things I Hate III

  • Photoshopped pictures of politicians
  • The term "Congresscritters"
  • Paper towel dispensers that are placed high enough on the bathroom wall so that water runs down your forearms when you reach for a towel
  • Bicyclists who ride two or three abreast instead of in the designated bike lane
  • When people talk to me on airplanes even though I have a book open on my lap
  • Suits made of acetate (why is it so hard to find a well-tailored women's suit made out of wool or silk?)
UPDATE: Added:
  • Skinny jeans
  • Blogs that update the same post in nonobvious ways two or three times a day for a week
  • Looking for airfares to Paris on four different search engines simultaneously

Sunday, April 16, 2006

Small bunny pilfering a cookie

The title kind of says it all.

Cravings

I read this and this the other day and was seized by a sudden craving for Cadbury Creme Eggs. Like so many foodstuffs that tasted great when you were a kid, those things are nasty.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

PTN Book Club Reminder

Don't forget that this month's selection is Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. There's nothing like decompressing after doing your taxes by curling up with a good book.

Friday, April 14, 2006

Fur. Will. Fly.

Have a happy Easter, people.

You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips / But my breath smells earthy strong.

In the comments to this post, Jacob Levy points out another odd statement by Catharine MacKinnon:
In the interview, MacKinnon complains that

"Sex with a dead body is necrophilia but it isn't regarded as rape."

I must admit to not really seeing what's wrong with that...
In response to a short digression on the possibility of ex ante consent to such conduct and its relationship to organ donation, he elaborates:
And yet necrophilia absent such consent still wouldn't be rape! Which suggests that consent, ex ante or otherwise, isn't really the operative concept at all...
There is probably an elaborate literature, or at the very least a weird law review article, dealing with this topic, but I'm going to skip searching Lexis and ask the readership: What is the operative principle at work here? When an individual (or the state; say, Texas, which until recently confiscated corneas without consent unless family members objected) infringes on the bodily integrity of a corpse, whose rights, if any, are violated? Are laws prohibiting such things moral regulations of a piece with bans on public lewdness?

My intuition is to feel that some violation takes place when a body is used against its previous inhabitant's wishes, but I watch too much Six Feet Under and am thus biased toward respecting the wishes of the deceased above all things. This sentiment may clash, moreover, with my otherwise consistent materialism. Force consistency upon me!

Thursday, April 13, 2006

No drugs for you!

Pharmacists in Washington State have refused to fill prescriptions for antibiotics and vitamins. Apparently the objections stemmed from the fact that the scripts came from a women's health clinic that provides abortions. (h/t)

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

That'll show him, Catharine!

Sometimes I wonder whether I would have enjoyed taking a class from Catharine MacKinnon. Things like this make me think I was better off skipping it (although if the choice is between MacKinnon and Janet Halley, who I did have at HLS, I'd pick MacKinnon; she appears an unlikely baklava thief).
Civil law, she says, is more effective. For example, she was asked to represent raped Bosnian and Croat women in a lawsuit against Radovan Karadzic. The result has been Kadic v Karadzic, and she is very proud of it. "We have an injunction against this man ever engaging in genocide again and people he's in contact with ever doing it again. We were also awarded $745m, which he has and our clients are entitled to. That's two forms of civil relief that actually could make a change in the situation." The important word there, surely, is "could". (Emphasis added.)

Always be my baby? (remix)

Is it just me, or does this relationship remind you of this relationship?

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

"An appeal run amok."

For appellate lawyers: Here's a case study in what not to do.

UPDATE: The attorney who wrote the brief has been disciplined once before.

I know what you did last summer. Want to get coffee?

I have posted before about my propensity to make inadvertently inappropriate rental choices. I still get teased about Atanarjuat. The first time I spent the evening with my high school boyfriend's uber-Catholic family, I, under the impression it was a generic courtroom drama, brought over a copy of Primal Fear. And the last time I stayed at my grandparents' house, I freaked them and myself out by renting Oldboy, which I thought was a standard action flick but which turned out to contain extended episodes of incestuous sex, complete with heavy moaning, and numerous scenes of graphic maiming.

Despite that last bit sounding like not much of an endorsement, Oldboy is an excellent if disturbing movie, and the New York Times Magazine's profile of its director, Park Chanwook, is great. (It does contains some plot spoilers for his films, though, which annoyed me greatly.) At the end of the piece, Park throws out this little anecdote about the internet and human relationships. I thought it was very perceptive, but that might just be because I like Googling people. Your thoughts?
Park told me a story that showed how much tradition can matter, even in cyberspace: "A young woman, working in our office, fell in love with a man through the Internet. The young man was so taken with her that he not only scrutinized her blog but followed all the links in her blog as well. He traced her family relationships, but also her entire private history, including her boyfriends going back to high-school days. Not only their names, but even their digital pictures came up through the links. In the end, he knew everything about her, without having to hire a detective."

Park continued: "You might find this invasion of privacy a bit scary, but young Koreans like it. It is, in a way, a revival of village life, a revival of community, where everyone knows everything about everyone else." But it is a peculiar community, where human intimacy takes place without physical contact.

Monday, April 10, 2006

Shelving the past?

Some people are talking about how they organize their books. I posted about this some time ago, but my book collection has been moved, reorganized, and enlarged since then.

I have exiled the law books to the living room, kept the Ayn Rand and free books in the second row, and largely maintained my lit-fic/trashy SF/fantasy divide. But I acquired a fair number of battered paperbacks from the Book Thing last summer; some of them even made it to Clerksville. My frequent air travel has necessitated the purchase of several underwhelming books which currently lie dejectedly on the forepart of the shelves, waiting for someone to purchase them off Half.com. I even received some books as gifts (for example, this one, an odd epistolary fantasy currently being made into a film starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, and Scarlett Johansson's bosoms).

I'm currently debating whether or not my shelfworthiness strategy, which almost always involves purchasing books after I have read them, should be modified to accommodate the needs of a more harried lifestyle. Constantly renewing library books because I forgot to bring them on court week may be more of a pain than sucking it up and paying six bucks for my own copy of Moby-Dick.

Scary.

How to unmask an anonymous blogger.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Crossing the picket line

This comment in a discussion on the Duke rape case caught my eye:
We already have an economy of sex where the slut is a figure of contempt because she’s like a scab that refuses to honor the picket line (withhold sex and sexual displays in exchange for a real relationship, a socially approved, heteronormative relationship).
Do you think this is an appropriate analogy? If not, why not?

Even if you disagree with the premise, it is darn catchy.

Red in tooth and claw?

The normally mild-mannered Lily has a dark side:



Snape, on the other hand, is mostly nonviolent.

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Friday, April 07, 2006

Angels in the angles

It's a shoe! It's a chair leg! Either way, I must convince myself not to buy this oddity.

Freaky-Deaky Neighbor

Check out this bizarre AskMe post in which a young woman tries to figure out why her new neighbor has more than a dozen visitors, each with a key, come by his apartment for less than five minutes between the hours of 5pm and 10pm.

"It's great being blonde; with such low expectations it's easy to impress."

I'm a brunette. At various times I've played up my hair's faint reddishness with chemicals, but it's always been dark. Last night, Steve jokingly proposed that I go blonde.

"No way. It's all wrong for my coloring, and besides, the neverending cycle of root touchups and highlights is too expensive."

(Seriously, that article made me want to break things. For every uber-rich Manhattanite who spends $500 per month on her hair and can afford it, there are two dozen other women there and elsewhere forking over half that to the salon when they could be saving or paying down debt. I've seen it. Meanwhile, a men's haircut is how much?)

Besides, when the reaction of others to less than 100 percent successful attempts at "self improvement" is something like this, I'm sorely tempted to keep my money and maintain my present look. Then again, not all women think being a girl is all about instantaneously and superficially judging every other female in range.

Maybe a new pair of shoes would be nice.

Thursday, April 06, 2006

Like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football . . .

. . . I keep trying to order the third disc of House, M.D. from Netflix. They sent it to me three weeks ago. The disc and sleeve said "Disc 3," but the episodes were from Disc 2, which I've already seen. I sent it back and reported it mislabeled.

They reshipped the disc once they received the defective copy two weeks ago. I played it: Same problem. It was probably the same disc. I reported it mislabeled, sent it back, and shot customer service an email. They wrote back without really saying anything but sent me another copy from a different distribution center.

I played that copy today. Who wants to guess whether or not it had the episodes from Disc 3 on it? Who?

I just want to see Hugh Laurie and the cute blonde doc flirt awkwardly! Is that so much to ask?

UPDATE: In response to an angry email demanding that amends be made, Netflix comped my next month's service. Yay.

When lawyers divorce

Via E. Spat, an illustrated divorce petition that will have you snorting inappropriately and even, dear reader, laughing out loud.

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Not our finest hour.

A former classmate points me to this postscript from an article based on Larry Kramer's remarks at the 2003 Federalist Society Student Symposium. Your thoughts or comments are solicited. The citation, should you wish to read the piece in its entirety, is Larry Kramer, On Findng (And Losing) Our Origins, 26 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 95 (2003).
POSTSCRIPT
The text above is a slightly elaborated version of my oral presentation at the conference. While it scarcely reflects anything radical (or even original!), it does take strong exception to the idea that we can or should be trying today to implement an eighteenth-century constitution as it was originally understood. In truth, I do not believe that anyone who is actually familiar with the eighteenth century would say otherwise. Originalism is a political slogan that stands for strong disagreement with a particular subset of modern decisions, not an unqualified commitment to wholesale restoration of the Founders' Constitution.
I doubt, for example, that the same people who want to undo the New Deal are also prepared to give the middle third of the country back to France, though from an originalist perspective the Louisiana Purchase stands on no firmer footing than the NLRB. Likewise, I imagine that the people who insist that Congress has no business enacting conditional spending programs probably are not likewise itching to tell President Bush that he must bring the troops in Afghanistan home right now, that all our executive agreements are void, and that the President must consult with the Senate before beginning talks with foreign leaders. We could, moreover, easily generate a very long list of similar examples, things so extravagantly implausible in the modern world that strict originalist talk begins to look silly.
These arguments are, I think, clear enough from the discussion above. What was striking, and somewhat dismaying, however, was that when I tried to make this point during the question-and-answer period of our panel, I was jeered. Nor was this the first time something like that has happened to me at a Federalist Society event, and I have seen it done to others, too. I confess that, when the laughter began, I grew angry, and I regret making my point by saying that anyone who held strict originalist views was either ignorant or an idiot. That was a product of frustration at being invited to speak to an audience that apparently had no interest in listening.
I was a second-year law student at the University of Chicago when the Federalist Society was founded. While I did not agree with its founders on most issues, I thought they had a point that something like the Federalist Society was needed because liberals had grown smug and stopped listening to arguments from those who disagreed with them. And in its early years, what gave the Society's events energy and legitimacy was its genuine commitment to honest discussion. The first conferences worked because of the Society's willingness, indeed eagerness, to create an environment where liberals and conservatives actually listened to one another. Liberal colleagues would sometimes joke that they had been invited to serve as meat for the audience to chew on, but we went because, in truth, it seemed like a place where ideas were taken seriously. No one expected to change anyone's mind (including their own), but one could still learn from people with different views.
Twenty years on top changes things, I suppose, and somewhere along the way the Federalist Society lost its original sensibility and became what it started out criticizing. The smugness and failure to listen are coming from the other side of the aisle now, and the rest of us, it seems, really are there just to serve as lunch meat. What a pity.

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Because A3G would have posted about this . . .

It's not every day that a federal judge shows up in a blog comment thread to defend a colleague's recent opinion. (h/t)

Monday, April 03, 2006

In which I succumb to pop culture

Veronica Mars is my new favorite show. It gets bonus points for making it seem unnecessary for me to ever watch Twin Peaks. Miss Mars, however, sometimes makes inexplicable and repeated mistakes. Why send out dozens of *somethings* to a variety of addresses, hoping that one will make its way to the sought individual, and not have some manner of tracking which *something* is being replied to? And couldn't a blood test performed within 24 hours detect the presence of rohypnol?

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Sometimes a glimpse is not enough.

Over at Marginal Revolution, a meditation on the ephemeral nature of contemporary art:
more and more artists make works they never expect will be lived with, looked at day in, day out by the same person; that much art is made for fairs or museums, designed to grab a distracted passerby's attention without needing to be experienced twice.
The one time I took an art class, I was actively mocked by both the professor and my fellow students for wanting to make things that I'd enjoy living with or seeing every day. This, they informed me, was the province of "arts and crafts classes," not capital-A Art classes.