Lactivism.

Nursing mothers protest Barbara Walters. Walters dared to say she felt uncomfortable sitting next to a nursing mother on an airplane.

Lactivism has been rather successful:

[S]ix states have recently passed laws giving a woman the right to breast-feed wherever she "is otherwise authorized to be."

Got a problem with that? I don't.

I know what it's like to need to breastfeed and be in a situation where there's nowhere private to go. One time, back in the early 80s, I breastfed my baby at the Baseball Hall of Fame. I remember feeling I was doing something really wrong and that I was about to be discovered at any point and treated harshly. So I like these laws. What are you supposed to do on a plane? You can't occupy the bathroom that long, and anyway, that would be a disgusting environment for a baby.

Breastfeeding mothers, like anyone else who has a right to be in a public place, should attend to their and their babies' physical needs discreetly and try not to trouble people. That means minimizing how much you expose yourself and not going out of your way to sit right next to a stranger. It's not shameful to be breastfeeding, but that doesn't mean it's in good taste to flaunt it.

As a rough comparison, imagine if you needed to blow your nose and you were in the middle of a store or a restaurant. We'd think it was outrageous if the owner kicked you out for doing it and rude if the other customers gave you dirty looks -- assuming you did it discreetly. But it would be rude of you and you'd deserve those dirty looks if you blew your nose loudly and sloppily right next to someone.

UPDATE: If anyone had ever told me that one day they'll be talking on TV about about my breasts and the Baseball Hall of Fame, I would have been amazed. Amazed and perplexed. (Does he make it sound like I was looking for a place to breastfeed, so I went to the Baseball Hall of Fame? I was that desperate.)

Kerry's college D's.

Revealed by the Boston Globe (via Memeorandum):

The transcript shows that Kerry's freshman-year average was 71. He scored a 61 in geology, a 63 and 68 in two history classes, and a 69 in political science. His top score was a 79, in another political science course. Another of his strongest efforts, a 77, came in French class.

Under Yale's grading system in effect at the time, grades between 90 and 100 equaled an A, 80-89 a B, 70-79 a C, 60 to 69 a D, and anything below that was a failing grade. In addition to Kerry's four D's in his freshman year, he received one D in his sophomore year. He did not fail any courses.

I told you he wasn't smart way back last August. I got a lot of flak for that, so let me just laugh a little over this one. And for old time's sake, here's a link to the classic Guardian article that asked the question: "Does anyone in America doubt that Kerry has a higher IQ than Bush?"

I'm sure their SATs and college transcripts would put Kerry far ahead.

Well, ha ha ha.

And shame on all the people who imagined they were perceiving brilliance in the man! Movie rental idea of the day: "Being There."

UPDATE: Soxblog, linked at the beginning of my August post, is also enjoying being vindicated.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This post is getting an awful lot of comments! You know what I think? I think everybody misses the old days of the presidential campaign. It was fun, wasn't it, back then, going over all the little things about the candidates? Nothing today is so consistently bloggable. I was glad when it was finally over and there was the new challenge of finding diverse things to blog about every day. But this post was a chance to relive the good old days of blogging about the campaign.

"Forget the century, it wasn't even the cultural story of the spring."

The Michael Jackson trial fell far short of "trial of the century." As a cultural story of the spring, "American Idol" was bigger.

Why did people find the Jackson trial so much less compelling than the O.J. trial? It's not just that the judge banned cameras in the courtroom. There are many other differences. For one thing, the charges were not new. There was no sudden, surprising event that transformed how we thought about a celebrity. There was only a decision to bring a celebrity to trial over things we've been hearing about him for years.

In the O.J. case, two persons were brutally murdered and the question was whether he did it. In the Jackson case, the question is whether a crime occurred at all, but if it did, there's no other person out there who might have done it. If it happened, Jackson did it. In the O.J. case, the reality of the dead bodies was an undeniable fact, foisted upon us. In the Jackson case, to be drawn in, we must engage with the question whether a crime occurred, and we can still turn away and think: I just don't know. It would be terrible if it were true, but I hope it's not.

About that Live 8 conference call.

Here's what Frank J. at IMAO has to say about the Live 8 conference call I wrote about earlier today. And here's John Hinderaker (who worked on setting up the conference call with Joe Trippi):

To say that I was impressed would be an understatement. Geldof is an extraordinarily knowledgable guy. Equally important, he is not soft-headed about Africa's problems. He emphasizes free markets and the need for political reform, which should be, and according to Geldof will be, a condition of the assistance that he advocates. Another important point, I think, is that he talks eloquently not only about the appalling conditions in some areas of Africa, but also about the striking progress being made in areas where political tyranny or upheaval have made such progress impossible.

And here's Citizen Smash:

[Geldof]’s devoted his life to fighting hunger and poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa, and it shows – Sir Bob really knows his stuff. And while he is clearly trying to reach out to a wide spectrum of people, he didn’t pull any punches when it came to criticizing those who waste, embezzle, or squander public money (at one point, he casually mentioned that both Prime Minister Berlusconi of Italy and French President Jacques Chirac would be in jail for corruption if they weren’t leaders of their respective nations). I was impressed.

Here’s the clincher: Geldof wasn’t asking for donations. He admits that food aid and even debt cancellation, while helpful, are of limited utility in the long run. Instead, he’s asking us to start a converstation about how to stimulate long-term development in Sub-Saharan Africa. “This isn’t Live Aid 2,” the website reads, “LIVE 8 is about justice not charity.”

Captain Ed simulblogged the phone call. Lots of details there, including the fact that Geldof was surprisingly positive about President Bush and Americans in general.

It struck me that Geldof, like Bush, saw establishing democracy as central to solving problems. And there was none of the Bush-related cynicism one normally expects to hear. How can Bush take the lead pushing for democracy in Africa when so many people in other G8 countries are derisive about his efforts in Iraq? No such thing was said. Geldof acted as if such a thought did not exist. He thinks Bush is perfectly positioned to take the lead.

Chapomatic highlights Geldof's statement: "Read your Adam Smith." Geldof was big on free trade and critical of all sorts of protectionism.

Here's Charles Johnson's post:

Despite my skepticism (rock stars with causes, oh boy), I was impressed with Geldof’s knowledge of the situation, and by his group’s ideas to make sure that whatever aid is generated will not simply be pocketed by corrupt African dictators. Ultimately, the vision seems to be to promote freedom and reform on the African continent. Geldof said, “Robert Mugabe will not be included.”

Like Johnson, I was impressed at how Geldof framed his presentation to be compelling to persons across the political spectrum.

Sorry I haven't written more about this today, but I will keep up on this story in the future.

The silent Justice Kennedy.

I've written about Justice Scalia's opinion in Raich, but what about Justice Kennedy? A colleague of mine emails: shouldn’t I be asking if he’s been hypocritical? He is flying under the radar, compared to Justice Scalia, the other member of the Lopez and Morrison majority who voted with today’s majority. Unlike Justice Scalia, Kennedy did not write a separate opinion. And unlike Justice Scalia, he tends to be thought of as less hard line about federalism matters. But Justice Kennedy wrote a strong federalism dissent in Hibbs (the Family and Medical Leave Act case), where the Chief Justice and Justice O’Connor both voted in favor of federal power. And he's been the needed fifth vote in the federalism-enforcing cases of the last seventeen years.

So let’s think about Justice Kennedy for a moment. Kennedy’s agreement with the majority today seems consistent with the beginning of the concurring opinion he wrote in Lopez:

The history of the judicial struggle to interpret the Commerce Clause during the transition from the economic system the Founders knew to the single, national market still emergent in our own era counsels great restraint before the Court determines that the Clause is insufficient to support an exercise of the national power. That history gives me some pause about today's decision, but I join the Court's opinion with these observations on what I conceive to be its necessary though limited holding.

The message here is that Congress has broad power to regulate the national market and that the Lopez case should not be taken as a major disturbance of settled assumptions.

But in the end of his Lopez concurrence, Kennedy, more than anyone else on the Court, professed respect for areas of traditional state concern and the role of the states as “laboratories of democracy”:

While it is doubtful that any State, or indeed any reasonable person, would argue that it is wise policy to allow students to carry guns on school premises, considerable disagreement exists about how best to accomplish that goal. In this circumstance, the theory and utility of our federalism are revealed, for the States may perform their role as laboratories for experimentation to devise various solutions where the best solution is far from clear.…

The statute now before us forecloses the States from experimenting and exercising their own judgment in an area to which States lay claim by right of history and expertise, and it does so by regulating an activity beyond the realm of commerce in the ordinary and usual sense of that term.

Justice O’Connor joined that Lopez concurring opinion. As the author of today’s principal dissent, she cites Kennedy’s Lopez dissent five times. She extols the role of the states as policy experimenters:

One of federalism’s chief virtues, of course, is that it promotes innovation by allowing for the possibility that “a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).

Justice Kennedy built his Lopez dissent upon that classic Brandeis idea. The opinion he silently joins today never examines the question from this viewpoint. At the very least, he ought to have resisted merging with the group of Justices who dissented in Lopez and Morrison.

I presume if he had come forward, he would have emphasized the general rule that Congress has broad, well-established power to regulate markets and that, when Congress is operating in that mode and not meddling with matters not part of a web of interstate buying and selling, it just doesn't matter that the states have some interesting policies they'd like to experiment with. Congress has chosen its policy, pervasively regulating the market, down to its tiniest components, and federal supremacy means that the congressional policy choice prevails over that of the states.

If that's the answer and if that is supposed to convince those of us who take the Brandeisian laboratories of democracy idea seriously, then he ought to have put it in writing.

Who was inconsistent about federalism in Raich?

On the eve of the oral argument in Raich, I wrote:

[I]t will be interesting to see the response of those who have harshly criticized the majority's recent federalism decisions and have professed abject deference to Congress and the Executive branch about federalism matters. From a liberal perspective, one might want to think: I support the enforcement of federalism limits when federalism is really a stand-in for individual rights, and I support strong federal government power when the federal policy in question is really a stand-in for individual rights. But it is rather hard to translate that instinct into sound constitutional law.

In today's decision, the Court's liberals -- all in the majority -- did not attempt to work out a tricky position of that sort. They stuck with their deference to Congress.

Conservatives faced a dilemma too, I wrote at the time, but only "if their conservatism is the kind that puts great importance on strong anti-drug enforcement."

But conservatives who take the libertarian position on drugs can happily seize a two-fold opportunity: they can demonstrate a principled fidelity to constitutional federalism and, at the same time, improve federalism's reputation among liberals.

Three of the Court's conservatives did take the side of the state, but Justice Scalia did not. Should we aim special criticism at him?

Scalia emphasized Congress's power to regulate what is certainly an interstate market. He notes that the Lopez Court said that private gun possession could be regulated as “an essential part of a larger regulation of economic activity, in which the regulatory scheme could be undercut unless the intrastate activity were regulated.” But there wasn't any scheme of regulating an economic activity that depended on banning the possession of guns only within a 1000-foot radius of a school, the law in question in Lopez. The Controlled Substances Act at issue in Raich is completely different. It regulates an interstate economic activity, the marijuana market, and that scheme would be undercut if it didn't extend to homegrown marijuana -- even homegrown marijuana used medically.

I'm sure many people will accuse Scalia of faltering in his support for federalism. But I have always thought the best way to understand Lopez is not by the commercial/noncommercial distinction, but by whether the regulated intrastate activity is part of a connected web of interstate activity. We can picture individual states making diverse, decentralized decisions about how to deal with violence in schools -- the interstate activity in Lopez -- without the policy in one state interfering with the approach chosen by another. One state's experiment with gun-exchange programs and parental responsibility laws doesn't undercut a tough imprisonment policy used in the next state. You don't need a uniform national law to deal with the problem. In fact, the different state policies work as experiments, generating information about which policy works best. But if it is to be possible to ban marijuana, a uniform national law is important. One state's lenient approach would undercut the next state's hardcore approach. That's the Lopez-based argument for congressional power in Raich.

I supported the Court's decisions in Lopez (and Morrison) precisely because of this kind of analysis (and not because of any economic/noneconomic distinction), so Scalia's opinion makes sense to me. I'm going to defend him against the accusation that he's turned his back on the Court's federalism doctrine.

Raich mega-blog, Live 8.

Don't miss the Raich mega-blogging going on over at SCOTUSblog. I'm going to be participating over there too, but I just got off the phone from the Live 8 conference call, which went on for over an hour. I must say that Bob Geldof is incredibly articulate and informed, even when hampered by the flu, as he was. He's trying to get bloggers involved and said he was excited to be talking to bloggers, that it reminded him of "being a hippie in the underground press."

UPDATE: I review what the other participants in the call had to say about it here.

Should the reason for using homegrown marijuana make a difference in Congress's Commerce Power?

I’m not at all surprised by the Supreme Court’s opinion in Gonzales v. Raich. Justice Stevens, writing for the six-member majority, relied heavily on Wickard v. Filburn, a 1942 case that upheld the regulation of a farmer’s production of wheat that he grew for use on his own farm and never intended to sell. The Wickard Court interpreted the Commerce Clause to allow regulation of the entire market on the ground that even trivial components on the market count, because, taken together, they have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Home consumed wheat was part of the market both because it supplied the home-use needs of the farmer who would have had to buy it in the market and because the farmer might change his intentions and decide to sell it in the market.

Under the 1995 case, Lopez v. United States, which struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act, there seemed to be some reason to think that a completely noncommercial activity might be treated differently from a farm, but Lopez did not involve regulating a market in a product, but individual gun possession.

Justice Stevens wrote what I thought the Court would have to say: if noncommercial, homegrown marijuana were seen as beyond the Commerce Power for medicinal users, it is also beyond the Commerce Power for recreational users. The theory is the same, that noncommercial user-producers can’t be included in the Wickard-style analysis. Justice O’Connor, dissenting, joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Thomas thought the two motives for growing and using marijuana are “realistically distinct” and for that reasons susceptible to different Commerce Clause analysis.

But why? O’Connor is giving affirmative force to the state’s interest in conducting it own policy experiments. But what if there were a state interested in performing the policy experiment of authorizing the recreational use of homegrown marijuana?

UPDATE: Justice Thomas distinguished the medical use from the recreational use because the state statute, California’s Compassionate Use Act, defined and controlled who could use marijuana. This would mean that Congress began with power to reach homegrowing medicinal users of marijuana, but lost that power when California set up its regulatory scheme, because the state regulation drew a crisp, new line. Does anything else in Commerce Clause jurisprudence work that way?

Madly multi-tasking.

I'm hanging on for a Live 8 conference call, where I'm not really sure what I'm doing, and trying to read and write about all four opinions in Gonzales v. Raich (the medical marijuana case), where I'm going to be blogging here and in a group effort elsewhere.

"The R. Crumb Handbook."

I've been reading "The R. Crumb Handbook." (Yeah, it's one of the five books referred to here, the guessing commenters will be interested to know.) I was not an R. Crumb fan until the movie "Crumb" drew me in. The Handbook is terrific, mixing written biographical text and illustrated pages. The text to a great extent tracks the story told in the movie, with some notable differences. The book emphasizes Crumb's Catholic upbringing, a subject entirely missing from the movie.

When you make a documentary, you take your footage and tell the story you want -- like a lawyer deciding what evidence to present. The R. Crumb of the movie was shaped by weird parents, the repressive American culture of the 1950s, and the liberating effect of LSD and sex. The Crumb of the book is much more grounded in serious respect for art and an intensely religious upbringing.

The book comes with a CD of Crumb's old-timey music. Fans -- like me! -- of Jim Kweskin should enjoy it. I'm sitting in a café, waiting to get my hands on the new marijuana case, and, needing to screen out something awful the baristas decided to unleash on the nerve-jangled customers, I started playing the Crumb CD through the headphones on my computer. The fifth song is a bit much, but it makes me laugh anyway. It's a jaunty little ditty called "My Girl's P***y."

Now, let's see if I can get to the case.

Feds win medical marijuana case.

Drudge reports. I'll read the case this morning and have much more soon.

UPDATE: Still waiting to get to the case. Here's my post from May 12th, predicting this outcome, explaining why, and saying why the Court was taking so so long:

[I]t's very hard to explain the Wickard concept in a way that will satisfy the general public, which finds it so easy to sympathize with the suffering cancer patients on the other side. The Court is just hung up crafting and recrafting its labyrinthine legalisms into a form suitable for public consumption.

Stencils!

Mmmm.

"It's crunch time for some of high court's biggest decisions."

Joan Biskupic has this in USAToday. (Via How Appealing.)

Among the cases to be decided are those that test whether certain public displays of the Ten Commandments are unconstitutional; whether states may legalize the use of marijuana for medical purposes; and whether companies that produce Internet file-sharing programs can be held liable for illegal copying by consumers.

I hope we get something big today.

"A very cold little jukebox."

"The iPod is a very cold little jukebox. It's a little digital marvel, but it's not radio." So says Cousin Brucie. His real gripe is not with the iPod, but with the so-called "Jack" radio format that sounds to him like an iPod on shuffle.

Radio, properly practiced, he said, is a theatrical art. "You have to have a persona," he said, "that transcends those tubes and transistors and wires and reaches into somebody's heart. When that light goes on and says 'Brucie, you're on the air,' my stomach turns warm and I know I'm with my friends on a giant telephone, having a party line conversation."

In recent years, Cousin Brucie has done the Oldies format on WCBS-FM, which is putting him out of work by switching to the Jack format. Jack is really Oldies too. It just only goes back as far as the 1970s.

I listened to Cousin Brucie in the mid-1960s when he was in his prime on WABC (AKA "WA-Beatle-C"). Those were the days before there was rock music on FM, and you only heard singles on the radio. Everyone in the NY area listened to Cousin Brucie in those great days of popular music. I can see how he's put off by Jack, and not just because it excludes his once-all-powerful voice. It deliberately cuts off the music of the 60s, the best music ever.

I can see why a format that does that is popular: people who arrived after the Boomers have plenty of reason to be sick of all our pop culture stuff. Forgive me if I get nostalgic about that 60s place once again, but it really was fine back then, with Cousin Brucie playing the new music, when the new music was the Beatles. Once an hour or so, he'd play an oldie, and in those days "oldie" meant a song from the 1950s or very early 60s, like "Peggy Sue" or "A Little Bit of Soap."

I remember how odd and disorienting it felt the first time I heard a Beatles era song called an "oldie." I considered it a misnomer. Jack seems to represent the same kind of feeling: my songs are not "oldies."

The rose Marilyn Monroe painted for President Kennedy.

Sold for $78,ooo.

It's rather nicely done actually. Her personal phone book brought a higher price, though.

UPDATE: Here's more on the personal items that were sold, including bras, stockings, and garter belts.

“The crowd was cheering. There was one woman who told us her budget was $500. Finally she bid $950 on pantyhose. When she got it she not only screamed, she cried — and the crowd was cheering.”

That sounds a little ugly. Vulturish.

A wife's reverie about infidelity.

Cristina Nehring writes an interesting review of Diana Shader Smith's "Undressing Infidelity: Why More Wives Are Unfaithful." Read the whole thing -- [subscription to The Atlantic required][try this] -- but let me quote the conclusion:

Unshakable loyalty to a central partner does not preclude passionate responses to other people. If it seems that way, it is only because of the puritanism, the pious emotional parsimony, of our American era.

Diane Shader Smith's book provides, ironically, a perfect example of this. Her introduction is an alarmist confession of her attraction to a man other than her husband. She recounts in detail her nervousness around him, her supposedly dangerous fascination with his charm. She criminalizes her feelings. And so, one might add (albeit more understandably, since she has led the way), does her husband. In a different culture her attraction would be viewed by her readers, herself, and her husband as perfectly natural and even commendable. What sort of a creature would you be if, having once found a human being who stirs your heart (and whom you marry, if you follow Rabbi Boteach's example, by age twenty-one), you were never stirred again?

The key is to incorporate chemistry into our marital lives, not to snuff it out. We are erotic and emotional animals, and when we react most fully to people, we react to them erotically and emotionally. We react this way to teachers and to students; to pop stars and to politicians; to interns, novelists, and waiters; to our elders and our juniors. It is a part of what allows us to relate to human beings across the social, political, and cultural spectrums. To demonize this responsiveness is to truncate our sensibility, our humanity. Better to share our passing fancies with our mates, to turn them like colored glass in the light, lest they become blades in our pockets. For this we need magnanimous partners. And we need an 18-karat commitment to those partners, who over the years will inevitably seem less perfect than those glinting shards of novelty in the corner of our sight.

"To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god," said Jorge Luis Borges. To love truly is to stay in love after the fall. It is to love more gratefully, more potently, because our god has come down to earth: the spirit has been made flesh and now walks—and slips, and flounders, and slouches—among us.

It's a delicate proposition—counterintuitive, presumptuous, heady, unreasonable. And yet therein lies its nobility and, perhaps, its necessity.

Well, that's awfully pretty prose, but something tells me Nehring has not actually played this tricky game. "Colored glass in the light," "glinting shards" -- try juggling with real emotions. Nehring's thought it through, intellectually, but on her own limited terms. She posits a "magnanimous partner" and "an 18-karat commitment." And the attraction to another is conveniently placed at the "passing fancy" level. If everything stays neat and manageable like that, maybe you can keep your marriage and still not "truncate" your "sensibility" and "humanity." It is a "delicate proposition," indeed, but passionate, sexual love is not going to behave itself in real life the way it does in your nice little reverie.

So you long to fulfill yourself through sexual attraction to others and, in doing so, add complex dimension to your marriage in a way that humanity-squelching, emotionally parsimonious Americans dare not? I look forward to reading your well-written essay about how that worked out.

UPDATE: A commenter makes me realize that I've linked to an article that requires a subscription. Magazines should realize that bloggers need to be able to link to them. Why should I read The Atlantic if I can't link to an article for my readers? Ah! The Atlantic has gone way downhill in the last couple years anyway. Way too much one-sided politics. I was going to let my subscription run out anyway, but I was thinking, looking at this new issue, that the back third of the book is worthwhile. But it's a lot less worth my while if I'm not thinking this might be bloggable.

Posing with the corpse flower.

Go over to the Titan Arum website and click on the live streaming video. You can spy on the people visiting the flower, see them posing in front of it, and even hear them talking. (The audio's very bad, though.) They don't know we're looking at them.

Judging from their faces, the flower has not yet begun to stink .

Ethnicity, spelling, and "rote" memorization.

Why were the top four contestants at the National Spelling Bee all of Indian ancestry? It's hard to analyze the phenomenon without offending anyone, but John Berger has a go at it in the NYT Week in Review:

Interviews with those winners, many who are the children of seamstresses or small-time shopkeepers, reveal that to bring the glow of accomplishment into their parents' spare lives, they will sacrifice television viewing and socializing to work on agonizingly slow and complicated experiments.

But Indians brought to spelling mastery some particular advantages, said Madhulika S. Khandelwal, an Indian immigrant who directs the Asian American Center at Queens College. Their parents or grandparents were usually educated, often as scientists or engineers; their parents generally spoke English and appreciated the springboard powers of education.

Unlike many American children who are schooled in sometimes amorphous whole-language approaches to reading and writing, Indians are comfortable with the rote-learning methods of their homeland, the kind needed to master lists of obscure words that easily stump spell-checker programs. They do not regard champion spellers as nerds.

By 1993, the North South Foundation, based outside of Chicago and devoted to making sure Indians here do as well in English as in math, set up a parallel universe of spelling bees. Now 60 chapters around the country hold such contests, according to its founder, Ratnam Chitturi.

They become a minor-league training ground for the major league 80-year-old Scripps National Spelling Bee, which was started by The Louisville Courier-Journal as a way to promote "general interest among pupils in a dull subject."

The enthusiasm has spread. There are now chat rooms and blogs where Indians discuss spelling. Stories about the contests are featured prominently in community newspapers.

(Blogging about spelling? I'd love to read that.)

What are we to make of this idea that some ethnic groups are more "comfortable" with rote learning than others? Is rote learning an unpleasant ordeal that some groups will tolerate, or can rote learning be a pleasure with intrinsic value? Why do Americans with distant immigrant ancestry think we need to structure education to spare our kids any contact with rote learning? We get so involved in thinking of our kids as creative and independently analytical that perhaps we deprive them of the opportunity to experience the joy of building their memorization powers.

Don't you sometimes undertake a memorization project just for fun? I do! Why shouldn't we think our kids would actually like doing memory exercises some of the time? Why do we always have to throw in the pejorative word "rote" when talking about memorization? Why don't we appreciate memorization as a beautiful human accomplishment?

Memory! What is more profoundly human?

And it is not merely memory that wins the spelling competition, it is analysis. The best spellers take the things they know -- root words and spelling conventions of different languages of origin -- and figure out how to spell words they don't know. We Americans of distant immigrant ancestry value analytical skills so much, but you need something in your mind to analyze, so memory is a crucial component of these intellectual activites we think are so important.

Let's build memory and be proud of it!

Justice McConnell?

Tony Mauro has a detailed piece in Law.com about Michael McConnell as a Supreme Court appointee. An excerpt:

[A]s scrutiny of his record intensifies, it's hard for many to decide exactly what McConnell is: conservative, liberal, or a perplexing blend of both.

Capitol Hill sources and other players in the increasingly frenzied Supreme Court sweepstakes place McConnell, a judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, at or near the top of the short list of possible picks for the high court if a vacancy occurs later this month.

And while some liberals like McConnell, others are gearing up for a battle royal against him, especially over his sharp opposition to abortion rights and his deep support for school vouchers and for aid to parochial schools.

"He is very troubling, and very likely," says Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Yet if President George W. Bush appoints McConnell, 50, it appears he will have at least some support from liberal academics, as he did when more than 300 law professors supported him for the appeals court judgeship in 2002. "He has integrity, smarts, and is more open to a range of views than others we might get," says one liberal law school ally of McConnell who did not want his name revealed before a vacancy materializes.

UPDATE: Am I for Justice McConnell?, a commenter asked. I'm certainly one of the 300 lawprofs who signed the letter Mauro refers to. And I love the idea of a "perplexing blend" of liberal and conservative, and not just because that's what I consider myself. I'm sure my blend is different from his. But what I want is a real human being, a hardworking, serious scholar, who is not an ideologue, but someone we really can trust for the next thirty years. It will be a credit to President Bush if he picks Judge McConnell.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Gordon concurs.

He's remembered as "Explorer of Mars"...

But Norman H. Horowitz -- dead at age 90 -- opposed a manned mission to Mars:

In a 1988 interview with The New York Times, he voiced disapproval of proposals to send humans to Mars, saying: "It's just as wrong as can be. It's wrong because it guarantees there won't be any space science. We know how NASA treats science as a second-class citizen when it competes with man-in-space programs."

I'm inclined to believe that.

But I must say, when I saw the headline about a 90-year-old "Explorer of Mars," an idea that occurred to me was having a one-way mission, sending some quite old persons to Mars, with no way to bring them back. I was assuming he'd be in favor of sending a man to Mars and imagined him saying I'm 90, send me! I'm going to die pretty soon anyway. I'd like to have a shot at making it to Mars. And you can just leave me there!

Would it be wrong to have a mission like that? Why is it that young people take the most risks with their lives? Shouldn't the oldest people take the most daring risks, since they've lived the greater part of their lives and therefore risk less of it?

But Horowitz what not that kind of Mars explorer, not the physical adventurer, but a man who did his explorations intellectually.

Titan Arum!

Here's the UW website for tracking the progress on the blooming of our Titan Arum -- corpse flower.

Four of the five bracts (or scales) that enclose and protect the plant's spathe and spadix now have fallen. The largest bract was still in place this morning. When the last one has fallen, it will be a signal to the bud that it is time to move toward its bloom. The maroon color is developing on the inside of the spathe. There is just a hint of it visible today. Much of Titan IV's spadix is purple in color, just as it was in 2001. The bloom is expected within the next 4-8 days.

You can click on the live streaming video of the flower. It's currently 84". Two feet to go to set a world record.

UPDATE: The description above is from yesterday. Today:

As of this morning, the largest and last bract had fallen only partially. The top of the spathe is showing more maroon at the margin, and the upper part of the spadix is turning dark purple. The top one foot of it is a beautiful greenish cream color.

"Judith Christ."

The Anchoress, writing about the problem some feminists have with the use of male pronouns to refer to God, points to this book -- "Judith Christ Of Nazareth, The Gospels Of The Bible, Corrected To Reflect That Christ Was A Woman, Extracted From The Books Of Matthew, Mark, Luke, And John" -- which addresses the problem somebody somewhere apparently has with the idea that Jesus was male. Is it worth getting upset about that book? Maybe not. There are many versions of the Bible, some rewritten in slang or as comics. It's just another way to take in the material. It's not as if someone is messing up the only copy. If you're concerned about blasphemy or heresy, and you think this book is a problem, don't read it. I have much more of a problem with demands that shared rituals be rewritten to eliminate the masculine references to God -- even though the argument that God is not male is much stronger than the the argument that Jesus is not male.

The "Judith Christ" version of the Bible reminds me of Virginia Woolf's "Judith Shakespeare," in "A Room of One's Own." Except it's not like it at all. Woolf envisions a female equivalent of Shakespeare -- Shakespeare's sister -- and works out that she would never have achieved anything. But "Judith Christ" gets to do exactly the same things Jesus did, mostly because virtually no effort was put into the creation of the new book. Just a few "search and replace" commands would do the trick. It would take some imagination to come up with the Virginia Woolf-style treatment of "Judith Christ."

Sex and religion: the Christian gender gap.

In recent years feminists have criticized the Christian church for what they consider its patriarchy and sexism, but far more women than men go to church. Peter Steinfels writes in the NYT:

And the pattern is not limited to the contemporary United States. With a few possible exceptions in Eastern Europe and Asia, the gender gap holds for Catholics and Protestants worldwide, even for the rapidly growing Pentecostal churches in Africa and Latin America. It has long been the norm in Catholic Europe, perhaps since the Middle Ages. Certainly the rolls of New England churches in Puritan times recorded a majority of female members, and 19th-century church leaders reported a similar preponderance of women at services.

By contrast, [David Murrow, author of "Why Men Hate Going to Church"] claims, no such gender gap exists in Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam - an interesting point, although one he doesn't at all document. "Only Christianity," he writes, "has a consistent, nagging shortage of male practitioners."

So why do men hate going to church? Hormones, says Mr. Murrow. Brain structure. Prehistoric imprinting.

Men can't sit still, want to be outdoors, aren't very verbal and can't read and sing at the same time. Men crave adventure, risk, danger and heroic sacrifice. Men value boldness. They love action, tools, technology and competition.

Men are hunters and warriors. Women are gatherers and child-tenders.

Is all this true? Mr. Murrow clearly thinks so, even if he apologizes now and then for being politically incorrect, or allows for many female exceptions, or hedges about whether he thinks those traits are ingrained and relatively fixed or culturally created and relatively malleable.

And Christian churches, he maintains, have an antimale culture. Their "spiritual thermostats" are set for women - set for comfort instead of challenge. The emphasis is on relationships, security, sensitivity, nurturance, children and family. Guys don't get it.

Well, my spiritual thermostat is set for being disgusted by that sort of talk.

Steinfels is somewhat critical of Murrow, especially his self-help writing style. He notes (citing the European historian Hugh McLeod):

[F]or freethinkers in the last two centuries the problem was never that too few men went to church but that too many women did. Their common explanation was nearly the opposite of Mr. Murrow's, although by today's standards it was no less politically incorrect. It was not that men were driven away from church by their warrior hormones, their less flexible brains and the peer pressure of their drinking buddies, but rather that they stayed away because of their greater rationality and composure, while women remained pious because of their emotional susceptibility and their subservience to the clergy.

What a complicated problem! The most complicated part of it is that you can't talk about it at all without offending everyone. What is the message here? Women should stop complaining about patriarchy and sexism, because the church needs to be patriarchal and sexist to keep the men from avoiding it altogether?

UPDATE: The quoted material above suggests that men and women inherently require different religions, but to put it that way is to say that religions exist to serve people's emotional needs and not because they are true in the sense that they claim to be true. If they are only serving emotional needs, then there's nothing wrong with women attending and men opting out. The problem goes away except to the extent that the women who attend want male companionship. If a religion is true in the sense that it claims, it would make demands on people, not simply cater to their existing preferences. But in a free society, people can decide not to meet the demands. If so, is it anything more than a social problem if more men than women turn away? The religion that claims to be true shouldn't change its tenets in order to balance the sexes, but I would think it could change some things about the service, such as the music or the sermon topics or the poliitical advice.

"A grotesque use of church."

The WaPo reports:

Gov. Rick Perry (R) is going to church tomorrow, not necessarily for the obvious reason: He plans to sign two bills sought by conservatives and passed by the Republican-dominated Texas legislature. One requires parents to sign off on abortions for minors; the other calls for a November vote on a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Actually, the signing will be held in the gymnasium of the private school that is next door to and under the auspices of Calvary Cathedral, one of the largest Christian churches in Fort Worth.

"This is way over the line," said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "This is a grotesque use of church by a political figure."

People who are religious Christians should find this as offensive as people who are not find it.

The spell is broken.

I watched the big National Spelling Bee the other day. Don't know why I didn't post about it. Maybe I didn't have the heart to say things about how the kids looked. (If a kid's going on TV and has even the shadow of a mustache, it's time to start shaving. Somebody needs to tell you that!) But looking back -- I was just reading this post over at Throwing Things -- I realize I do have something I wanted to say. I think the new success of the Spelling Bee, now that it's the subject of a movie and a Broadway show, has destroyed its beauty and innocence. Although some of the kids retained that classic nerdiness -- I loved the kid who turned to the side and talked into his fist for each syllable -- a lot of them had become smartasses, like the girl who asked "How do you spell that?" and the girl who heard a word and said "Whatever!" If you think you're cool, why am I watching you spell? The whole charm was that you were the completely uncool kids.

Why Brad Pitt is fun to watch half the time.

I agree with this theory. And don't forget "Fight Club," where Brad's good.

Number 1.

From the Daily News:

For the first time since WKTU (103.5 FM) started doing top-103 countdowns for each decade, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" is not No.1 for the '70s.

This shocking news came out when 'KTU did its latest countdown and the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" bumped Gloria to No.2.

Prince's "1999" was No.1 for the '80s, while Madonna's "Vogue" was No.1 for the '90s.

So dance music ruled for thirty years? If you'd have told me in 1976 that was going to happen, I would have broken down and cried!

It seems to me they didn't even get the best Prince song from the '80s, but I think what happens with these things is that something becomes iconic, so that it's not the song so much anymore but everything it's come to symbolize. Like for example, the way life is just a party and you wouldn't even care if it was Judgment Day, people were running everywhere, and, of course, the sky was all purple. Somehow that sums up how, looking back, you feel about the 80s.

So what are we to make of "Stayin' Alive" upsetting "I Will Survive"? Our idea of the 70s, up until recently, entailed a woman summoning up her inner powers, and now the decade feels more like a man just struggling to get by. As with "1999," we've got destruction all around -- "Feel the city breakin' and ev'rybody shakin'" -- and the singer's way to deal with it is to party: "Got the wings of heaven on my shoes/I'm a dancin' man and I just can't lose."

And actually, "Vogue" tells the same story. There's "heartache" and "the pain of life" "everywhere," and the solution: "It's called a dance floor."

So there's your formula for popular music: acknowledge that the pain of the real world and present dancing -- to this very song -- as the solution. People love that.

UPDATE: Looking at the WKTU website now, I can see the lists were specifically of dance songs. The Daily News didn't specify that, but I guess if you're in NY you know the station's format. Side note: I can remember listening to top 100 lists on a NY station in the mid-70s. Number 1 was always "In the Still of the Night."

"We didn't know how people were so into a stinky plant, a monster, a beast."

The WaPo notices us:

The rare, big and extremely stinky flower that caused a sensation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when it last bloomed in 2001 could become the world's largest flower when it blooms again next week.

The titan arum stood at 6 feet, 4 inches Thursday in a UW-Madison greenhouse, on pace to rival the world record for cultivated flowers when it blooms and releases its trademark roadkill scent in the coming days....

In 2001, Big Bucky's bloom drew some 20,000 visitors who waited in long lines to see the spectacle...

"We didn't know how people were so into a stinky plant, a monster, a beast," said Mohammad Fayyaz, director of UW-Madison's Botany Garden and Greenhouses....

"If we break the record," he said, "it's great for the country, the state and the city of Madison."

This is so exciting! Right next to the Law School, too. I can tell when it's about to bloom, because then line backs up right under my office window. What a privilege!

What's better, a group blog or an individual blog?

Gordon Smith has a lot of interesting things to say comparing group blogs and individual blogs. Is one sort of blog better than the other? It seems that there are a lot of variables that make some group blogs better and some individual blogs better. But what are all these variables? Gordon gets the subject going. Some pairs or sets of bloggers make each other better because they generate more posts, with more regularity, and because they play off each other or balance each other in some way. But sometimes a blogger you like adds a co-blogger to plump things up and only dilutes the quality of the blog. One blog I used to read every day added a co-blogger, and I found myself reading less and less over time, so that now I check in maybe twice a month.

Some blogs have so many people it's just irritating. HuffPo is the egregious example here. What a mess! Some political hacks churn out whole columns, some comedians jot down some notes that are kind of funny if you imagine the way they'd say it out loud, and some slightly well-known people repeat very conventional observations with no style at all. No one seems capable of keeping a solo blog, but if there were a few people in there who could, I wouldn't know, because I'm not going to slog through all the bad. And I find the environment there so un-charming that it doesn't put me in the mood to find the good.

I like running an individual blog, though I did temporarily group-blog last fall when Megan McArdle, Michael Totten, and I took over Instapundit (scroll down). When I did that, I still kept this blog going, and I was very aware of the different feelings I had writing in the two places. Over here, the whole blog is my self-expression. I don't have to stop and think about whether my saying something is good for the group. But operating within a group is good in different ways. It occurred to me as I wrote that that it's like the difference between living single and living in a family. There are benefits and limitations in both, but once you've made your choice, it's going to change what kind of a person you are.

Gordon wonders whether some individual bloggers -- he names me and two others -- could make some big, popular megablog, and he thinks it probably wouldn't work. The whole would be less than the sum of the parts. I guess that's a compliment! Are there people you want to read solo whom you'd like less if they were matched up with some appropriate co-bloggers? (And who would be appropriate for me?) And are there group blogs that you read that are written by individuals you'd shun if they set up a separate site?

A side note: the group blogs Gordon especially likes -- Marginal Revolution, Crooked Timber, and Volokh Conspiracy -- all put the blogger's name at the beginning of the post. I wish all group and partnership blogs would follow this pattern. Too many times have I read a post thinking it was one blogger only to realize it was one of the others, and on some blogs I only like one of the bloggers, and that little extra trouble of scrolling down to see the name and then back up to start reading is a disincentive to go over there at all. I know this is a default in the software, but changing it is important!

Cedar Point.

Last month, when I was planning my drive out to Ithaca and back, lots of readers advised me to take a quick detour from I-90 and go to the roller coaster paradise at Cedar Point. I didn't. But Rick Lee did and has the pictures to prove it.

Oscar teaches the Germans a lesson...

At the University of Boogie.

That was hips.

I love the way this BBC article about how fat hips protect women from heart attacks is headlined "Curvier women 'will live longer'" and illustrated by an above-the-waist photo of Catherine Zeta-Jones. (Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: And what's with the euphemism "curvy"? This is an article about fat hips. Really, even "hips" is a euphemism. You know where that fat is when the measurement at hip level is 40+ inches. But this whole thing is pseudo-science-y! The chemistry cited in the article has to do with the fat tissue, so there shouldn't be any magic to the inches. Picture a very short, small-boned women. I'm sure she'd have the relevant fat tissue at well under 40 inches. And why would it be all or nothing? Get it up to 40 or there's no point at all in maintaining that fat ass!

ANOTHER UPDATE: And check out this picture Jeremy took in Poland. I think that poster says "Americans are fat."

A new way to get famous.

Reading aloud by the side of the street in Beijing.

The shrine...

Of Hollywood Beauty.

Pro-choice inclinations and relentless practicality.

Rebecca Mead has a piece in The New Yorker about Laura Bush that is written in that labored style that makes you assume she really must have a point that matters. I'll leave you to find the point, if you want. I just wanted to break out this one sentence:

Barbara Bush’s pro-choice inclinations, consistent with the relentless practicality displayed by her heel height and sensible hairdo, was taken to be a much more significant indicator of her husband’s true position on abortion than anything he might have said to pro-life voters.

Okay, obviously, the subject and the verb don't agree. You'd have thought The New Yorker, with all its pretensions about writing style, would never let a mistake like that through.

But let's move on.

What's practical -- let alone "relentlessly practical" -- about the big, teased, rigidly-in-place, bubble hairstyle? I see relentlessly practical hairstyles on women every day. Long, parted, naturally straight hair is relentlessly practical. Very short, Beatle-cut, thin hair is relentlessly practical. All-one-length, naturally curly hair is relentlessly practical. A slicked-back ponytail is relentlessly practical. You try getting your hair into a Barbara Bush/Ann Richards teased bubble without professional help!

I can't address the subject of Barbara Bush's shoes, as I have no mental picture to draw from, but what exactly is it about sensible shoes and hair that is supposed to suggest a pro-choice position on abortion? If the article weren't so hostile to George W. Bush overall, I would suspect the writer of having the old-fashioned sort of anti-feminist attitude that relied on the argument that feminists are feminists because they can't attract men or don't want to! So what's the point? An idle slam against Barbara Bush?

But the larger point here is that a Republican President who must say things to please his anti-abortion constituents does well to have a wife who signals to abortion rights supporters that they really don't need to worry that he'll take their rights away. The husband and wife conjoin into a mystical entity that works some political magic.

"It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is."

So says Steven Pinker.

It's Chris's birthday!

He's 22. Let me take a picture of you:



We go out for a nice little dinner at Harvest. Take a picture of me:



Now, I'm back home and he's out celebrating with friends.

But here's a birthday toast to you:



Happy birthday!



NOTE: I swapped the fourth picture for a different one.

Snowflake babies and Nobel sperm.

Two articles in today's NYT caught my eye.

There's this front-page article about "snowflake babies," grown from embryos produced by fertility clinics:

People on this part of the political spectrum have begun calling the process "embryo adoption," echoing the phrase that Snowflakes uses instead of "embryo donation." The Health and Human Services Department has termed the process embryo adoption in certain grants. Bills that would formally call it "embryo adoption" have begun to filter into statehouses in California, New Jersey and Massachusetts, states that, not coincidentally, are at the forefront of legalizing and encouraging embryonic stem cell research.

The adoption terminology irritates the fertility industry, abortion rights advocates and supporters of embryonic stem cell research, who believe that the language suggests - erroneously, they maintain - that an embryo has the same status as a child.

But for some conservative Christians, that is precisely the point.

The children are sometimes dressed in T-shirts that say "snowflake baby" and used in political displays.

The second article is a review of a book about "the rise and fall of the Repository for Germinal Choice, the sperm bank that opened in 1980 and purported to offer top-echelon sperm -'dazzling, backflipping, 175 IQ sperm' - courtesy of Nobel Prize winners." The "genetically ambitious" pregnancy-seeking clients of this place were quite different from the embryo-adopters.

So, what do you think? Is it good or bad for women to use their capacity to produce children in either of these ways? At least in the case of a woman who needs to employ modern technology to become pregnant, what is wrong with acting out your religious beliefs by adopting an embryo that would otherwise be destroyed or experimented upon, and what is wrong with seeking out the best possible sperm? Do we worry that the child will be mistreated, that the parents will think of their child in the wrong way? Do we worry that the women in question will have the wrong religious beliefs or the wrong ideas about what good sperm is?

UPDATE: I'm thinking that there are a lot of people who believe in "choice" when it comes to abortion rights who don't really endorse choice when the woman produces a child, because this woman exercising choice then has a real child under her control, and we may worry about the consequences. If you have that split view of choice, you reveal your mistrust in women. Then there's the split view of the other way: you oppose abortion but you approve of broad autonomy in letting women use various methodologies of reproduction and in acting out their religious, political, social, and intellectual goals through their children.

Tom Cruise is an actor.

Why are people fretting about Tom Cruise? I've seen the clip of his expansive, physical expression on "Oprah" and the "Access Hollywood" thing, and both look entirely like his big "Help me help you" scene in "Jerry Maguire." The man is an actor who happens to be especially good with comic physical demonstrations and not so good at the realistic depiction of genuine human emotion.

Traveling through western landscapes.

Tonya has pictures from her rafting trip on the San Juan River in Utah -- including petroglyphs and Anasazi ruins. And I quote this though it threatens to set up a theme of the day on this blog:

One unusual thing about camping in remote areas is that there is an excessive amount of discussion about bodily functions -- when to go, where to go, how long you can avoid going, etc.

Much as I'd like to take in these sights and even knowing how much fun Tonya had, I can't see going camping. And camping with boating seems even worse, because you've got all that sun exposure. But that's just me. I love the Western landscapes. Taking them in, however, I have some strong preferences. Transportation: car. Where to sleep: hotel. Place to tend to physical needs: women-only bathroom.

UPDATE: I will note that I would be willing to go on the kind of rafting trip Tonya describes if I were paid enough. Putting a price on things like this is an Althouse tradition. I'm assuming a week-long raft trip, well-run, well-supplied, with people I enjoyed and through a landscape I wanted to see. I would do it for $1,000 -- the equivalent of "Star Wars" and an egg salad sandwich in Althouse valuation.

The "highly-charged," "gendered" bathroom.

It's a serious area of feminist studies, to the surprise of Boston Globe Columnist Alex Beam:

When I first saw the ''Call for Papers -- Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets" posted on an academic website, my beeswax detector went off. There can't really be two professors planning to publish a book working from ''the premise that public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division" . . . can there?

Yes!

Here is some more rhetoric from the book proposal: ''Indeed, public toilets are among the very few openly segregated spaces in contemporary Western culture, and the physical differences between 'gentlemen' and 'ladies' remains central to (and is further naturalized by) their design. As such, they provide a fertile ground for critical work interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology can be formed in public space and inscribed through design."

I think this is an excellent subject for scholarship, actually, but I will strenuously object if it leads to political action in the form of trying to abolish separate bathrooms for women.

What's for dinner?

Crabcakes and tuna. Cosmopolitans and metropolitans. And lotsa conversation that I cannot relate.

Let's deliquesce and get squibbery!

Over at Throwing Things, they are very serious -- and funny! -- about the big National Spelling Bee, which can be followed at the website, and, tomorrow, on ESPN. I've set the TiVo. I love the spelling bee!

Is a routine political compromise a crime?

Gordon Smith writes about a Wisconsin statute that makes "logrolling" a felony.

List-o-mania.

Here's a list getting a lot of links today: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. The first three, sure, but after that, it's more, huh? What's really the game here? The first three seem to be there so we can slam the other things -- "The Second Sex," "The Feminine Mystique" -- by putting them in their company.

But people love lists. People will read lists. There's something so readable about them. In 1977, "The Book of Lists" was a huge best seller. I happen to have a copy here. Let me show you my favorite page:



UPDATE: The first page of "The Book of Lists" is a set of seven lists of "The Most Hated and Feared Persons in History" for the years 1970-1976. Hitler comes in Number 1 for all the years except 1972 and 1973, when Nixon comes in first! In fact, 1972 was a good year for Hitler, when he made it all the way down to fourth place. Idi Amin and Mao Tse-tung were, along with Nixon, more hated and feared. Satan was in fifth place that year. Amusingly, by 1976, Nixon is off the five-person list altogether, and Jimmy Carter is on, tied for fourth place with Count Dracula. The list was based on asking "3,500 international visitors" to the Madame Tussaud Wax Museum in London "which persons -- past or present -- they hated the most."

Possibly the worst sentence I've ever read in the NYT.

I was going to say something about the content of today's Tom Friedman column, but I've decided to say something about the form. Check out this sentence:

Bottom line: We urgently need a national commission to look at all the little changes we have made in response to 9/11 - from visa policies to research funding, to the way we've sealed off our federal buildings, to legal rulings around prisoners of war - and ask this question: While no single change is decisive, could it all add up in a way so that 20 years from now we will discover that some of America's cultural and legal essence - our DNA as a nation - has become badly deformed or mutated?

What we "urgently need" is an editor. Talk about "badly deformed or mutated"!

"The boys seem to have a headstart on this 'blog' thing."

Take a look at The Cotillion, a gathering place for conservative women bloggers.