This blog is 13 years old today.

If you want to read in chronological order, you'll have to start here, January 14, 2004:

This blog is called Marginalia, because I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.

If you keep reading, you'll have to read 47,395 posts before you get to this one. Imagine all the transitory matters — big and small — you'd have to get your mind around again to read through these posts — an average of 10 per day for all those days. And — as I've said every year on January 14th — I've written every single day. Never one day without writing. And I'm still going on the intrinsic joy of writing. It's incredibly rewarding to have readers.

It's been great being a law professor for the last 32.5 years. There are many rewards as well as challenges working with colleagues and students, but there is always the element of coercion. You must do your job — obligations continually arise — and the people you interact with are stuck with you. They may like some of it, but they won't like all of it. And there's always a mystery about where the line is between love and tolerance and between tolerance and loathing.

I've withdrawn into the purely voluntary world of blogging. January 12th, the last day of Fall semester and my birthday, was my last day at work. We will see what happens to the blog now with my new dosage of time and freedom. I'm curious to see! I not only have more time and freedom, I have the curiosity to see how the new time and freedom will affect the writing here.

If you don't give a damn, fine! I am weary of inflicting myself on people who may not continually consent to listening to me. I don't like imposing on anyone, and it's not my favorite thing to consume words for which I do not feel an ongoing hunger. How much Supreme Court prose must I drag my eyes across without even the hope of getting to a Scalia opinion? 32.5 years of obligation to slog — 32.5 years of slogligation — is enough.

We're about to get our low-attention-span President, and I will indulge my low-attention-span reading propensities. We will see what happens. So far what has happened, doing only what I love here, is 13 years of 10-post-a-day blogging without a single day's break. It's not as though I'm doggedly plugging away here trying to keep a record going. It's only blogging if it runs on intrinsic reward.

The heart is still beating, and it's one more morning on Althouse. Or as it was for just that first day, Marginalia.

"I’ve always said that if I quit blogging/punditry it will be because I don’t want to pay close attention to the news anymore."

Says Instapundit, linking to Thomas Sowell's last column. Sowell gives his reason:

Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age, so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long....

Being old-fashioned, I liked to know what the facts were before writing. That required not only a lot of research, it also required keeping up with what was being said in the media.

During a stay in Yosemite National Park last May, taking photos with a couple of my buddies, there were four consecutive days without seeing a newspaper or a television news program — and it felt wonderful. With the political news being so awful this year, it felt especially wonderful.

This made me decide to spend less time following politics and more time on my photography, adding more pictures to my website....

Here are his photographs.

I'm 20 years younger than Sowell, and I'm retiring from law teaching. Not from blogging — not yet. I do like the idea of not needing to be interested in court cases that happen to come up in my field. Blogging, by contrast, is naturally limited to whatever I'm actually interested in. If I didn't want to pay close attention to the news, I'd pay attention to whatever did grab me and write about that. I'm not old-fashioned like Sowell. I can write around anything I don't know and don't want to research. You probably don't even notice when I avert my eyes from a subject in the news — not unless I don't resist writing about how I'm not writing about something.

I teach my last class today.

I look forward to never having to require anyone to read something or to force them to listen to me. It's not just about freedom for me. It's about freedom from me.

UPDATE: Done! Still exams to write and grade and loose ends to tie up. The official end of the semester is January 12th — my birthday.

This is my last real weekend — weekend weekend.

It's not that I'm not going to work ever again, but I'm never going to have work scheduled on a weekday/weekend schedule once classes end this coming Thursday. That means this is my last chance to feel the feeling that is The Weekend. Not that I'm not working this weekend. I am. But in my own way, on my own schedule.

IN THE COMMENTS: Rob links to this:

Up at 5:30, 5 morning posts published by 7.

I put on my hat and coat and walked downtown. 35°. Black coffee at the State Street Colectivo....



... used that green-and-black fountain pen to make 4 drawings in that little Moleskine. (Amazon links added to remind you to consider using my links and my Amazon Portal.)

Back home by 10, having walked 3.8 miles according to the iPhone app. The town looked pretty deserted. Few signs yet of the football game that hits the neighborhood at 2:30 today. A couple of folding chairs set up in a parking lot ready to accommodate tailgaters. I see Nebraska lost yesterday, which means the Badgers have clinched the Big Ten West title whether we beat the Gophers today or not.

It's the second to the last weekend of the semester, my last semester, and I'm going over all the retirement-related paperwork. I fret about getting that right but have no anxiety about the looming prospect of not working. I wonder how much to write about how I feel. Maybe this is a subject to be discreet about, because other people need to work. But what about the people who are hanging onto work? Eh! I can't assume their experience would be like mine. Some people like the structure of work or need some kind of affirmation that comes from participation in the workplace. A retired colleague once said to me, very sadly, that if you retire, you become "irrelevant." I don't remember what I said. Probably just something nice, but I've thought about his remark and his sadness, and the funny thing is it's irrelevant! I don't remember ever arriving at the idea that I was relevant in the first place, and losing relevance feels like a strange thing to worry about. If I examine it from an angle that suits my frame of mind, it looks like liberation.

If Facebook knows what it's doing with serving up ads, then I need a $4,215 gunsmithing lathe... and a hot dress.

Here's what I'm seeing on Facebook right now:



If you want to buy that gunsmithing lathe, please use this Althouse Amazon link.

It seems pretty cool, doesn't it?



I may want new work, now that I'm about to hang up my law-professor spurs.

I can just see myself, gunsmithing at the Shop Fox, then going out carousing in my hot dress.

There's a little arrow in the upper right corner of the ad, so I click that and get...



I am so tempted to click "I already own this." Then what ads would I get? Or would the government start spying on me? And spare me the comment "Start?! Althouse you are so naive."

Here's the link to John's post about spellchecking "commenter." Don't hesitate to make a comment, er....

If my post made you wonder why I wrote "Parents are so terrible!" — feel free to speculate in the comments, but you will never guess.

If my post made you wonder about the origin of the phrase "hang up your spurs," read this, at Grammarphobia.

Today, to “hang up one’s spurs” (or the tools of one’s trade) means to retire from the field, to give up, or to turn one’s attentions elsewhere. This... is a tradition dating back to classical times. The Roman poet Horace, who lived in the first century BC, refers to this tradition... [w]ith the lines nunc arma defunctumque bello / barbiton hic paries habebit, the narrator decides to retire metaphorically from the field of battle and hang up his weapon—the lyre with which he does his wooing.

ADDED: Meade says "'the lyre with which he does his wooing' should be a picture of me from the New York Times on the front porch with my laptop." He means the picture of him here.

Would Cass Sunstein support law school admissions based solely on LSAT scores?

That's a question that occurred to me as I was reading his column "Job Interviews Are Useless":

Employers, like most people, tend to trust their intuitions. But when employers decide whom to hire, they trust those intuitions far more than they should....

A lot of evidence suggests that... employers will stubbornly trust their intuitions -- and are badly mistaken to do so. Specific aptitude tests turn out to be highly predictive of performance in sales, and general intelligence tests are almost as good. Interviews are far less useful at telling you who will succeed.

What’s true for sales positions is also true more generally. Unstructured interviews have been found to have surprisingly little value in a variety of areas. For medical school interviews, for example, they appear to have no predictive power at all: in terms of academic or clinical performance, those accepted on the basis of interviews do no better than those who are rejected. In law schools, my own experience is that faculties emphasize how aspiring law professors do in one-on-one interviews -- which usually provide no information at all about how they will do as teachers or researchers....

In fact, some evidence suggests that interviews are far worse than wasteful: By drawing employers' attention to irrelevant information, they can produce inferior decisions. For example, people make better predictions about student performance if they are given access to objective background information, such as grades and test scores -- and prevented from conducting interviews entirely....

The headline way overstates the point in the text, which compares "unstructured interviews" with "specific aptitude tests." But Sunstein enthusiastically presents research that is skeptical of human intuition and sanguine about the objectivity of tests. And he doesn't give any sign of noticing any complexity in the idea of what it means to "succeed."



Where do we stand these days on the subject of "objective" tests? I've seen them disparaged over the years. Is liberal opinion turning in favor of these these tests? I remember, circa 1990, hearing a very famous law professor denounce the LSAT as evidence of absolutely nothing. I suggested that the LSAT was at least useful in giving those who'd squandered or botched their college education* a chance to show what they're capable of doing now, and she fiercely stood her ground. The LSAT has no value other than its negative value as a vector of discrimination.

But perhaps objective-test meritocracy is on the upswing. I wonder why. What's in the air these days? And can the air be objectively tested?


__________________________

* I was thinking of myself. I arrived at college in 1969 with a headful of ideas from Bob Dylan, the hippie movement, "The Way of Zen," and the Sermon on the Mount. I exited college with a BFA and a major in painting. But after 5 more years of youthful foolery, I had nailed a 99th percentile on the LSAT. Didn't that mean something? Or was I an inappropriate interloper? A third of a century later, I believe I was.

"Ann, the two of us need post no more/We both found what we were searching for/With a friend who texts my phone/Rat pics like Mr. Bone...."

From Meade's sung-to-the-tune-of-"Ben" song, posted on yesterday's Most-Loved-Rat post, which was at the top of the blog from 10:48 a.m. yesterday until 9:02 today.

Perhaps you wondered if this blog had ended with a whimper — a squeak from Rattatz...



... and Mr. Bone....



No, I am back. The Altexit plan has been implemented, but that only relates to law-proffing, not blogging, and part of the idea is to free the blog to go where it will go without tethering to teaching and the ineffable moral pull of the old scolding "You, a law professor."

"[T]he most competent and engaged workers are often at the greatest risk for burnout."

"Their willingness to labor for love and not money will, over time, expose them to chronic stress. That is especially true in universities, where there are few explicit limits on working hours.... [B]urnout is more acute in younger faculty members than in older ones (and in women more than men). It’s easier to do too much too soon than to build barriers between your work and psyche.... Academic culture fosters burnout when it encourages overwork, promotes a model of professors as isolated entrepreneurs, and offers little recognition for good teaching or mentoring... The response to faculty burnout should, therefore, not be to shrug and say that academic work is a labor of love, and some people just aren’t cut out for it. Instead, the response should be to find ways to give these highly skilled workers the rest, respect, and reward they need to stay healthy and effective. Institutions cause burnout, and only a whole effort of an institution can deal with it. A good start would be for colleges and universities to support and reward the things they say they value.... That would be more useful than drafting another strategic plan that will be ignored a year later."

Writes Jonathan Malesic, who left a tenured position teaching theology at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Malesic presents himself as having "burned out" after 11 years and at the age of 40. I say "presents" because he didn't leave the job purely because he burned out. He also did it to live with his wife, who'd gotten a job in what sounds like a nicer place than Wilkes-Barre. (He refers to it as "a bucolic region."*) And he's "working on a book about the spiritual costs of the American work ethic," which sounds like a better job. Writing a book is much more relaxing than writing a book and also teaching and handling administrative work — with all the demands and annoyances inherent in dealing with other people — except to the extent that you stress yourself out about how you're not operating from within the normal, respected structure of working in America. But if that's the very topic of your book — "the spiritual costs of the American work ethic" — that stress is a source of material.

I can't tell whether Malesic meditates on his manhood as he labors in the shade of his wife's career. Does he look at his name and shudder to think "male sick"? His essay gets a little personal, but perhaps not that personal or not personal in that way. In any case, I love the topic "the spiritual costs of the American work ethic." It's something I have always thought about, and I have never fallen into the problem of burnout that he's talks about, which sounds like a manic-depressive cycle, within which you get high off the intense work and then crash. I've always had strong boundaries and a deep instinct to protect myself from absorption into the mind of any workplace — including the one where I've worked for the last 33 years and from which I'm walking away very soon, with no sense of burnout, just a desire for more freedom.

________________________

* After writing this post, I found his website, and it says he lives in Dallas. "Bucolic"? [ADDED: I'm making an inference that could be incorrect, that he spent his sabbatical in the place where his wife received the job.]

I'm saying this for the last time.

I'm teaching my last semester at the law school. Every class I teach I'm teaching a case for the last time — sometimes a case that I've taught 30 or 50 times. Yesterday, I taught Marbury, a case I've taught about 100 times and the first case I ever taught. It means nothing, I don't think, to the students, but there's something transcendent for me.

"This is the new pen...."

I'd said the other day, "I ordered the pen. I ordered the ink." The ink arrived yesterday and the pen today. I'm just so pleased with it. I'm getting back to my artistic proclivities. #Altexit.

The return of the Pelikan.

"Wonderful chunky bottle. I shall be keeping it long after the ink has been drunk."

Says a commenter at the Amazon page for No-Shellac India Black Fountain Pen Ink, and it does look good, judging from the bottle.

But it's a touchy business, looking for a serious, dark black ink that will work in a fountain pen. I'm seeing a wellspring of positive opinion for Noodler's Black Waterproof Fountain Pen Ink. And then there's Pelikan Drawing Ink, #518 Black Fount India, which calls out to me because of that name, Pelikan, which that's what got me searching for ink in the first place: I was thinking about that Pelikan fountain pen that I lost 30 years ago.

I'd used that pen to take notes and doodle in the margins throughout law school, 1978-1981....



Maybe I wouldn't have scored so high on so many law school exams if I hadn't inscribed my scattered thoughts with such powerful ink. If I'd written in Bic ball-point or Flair felt-tip like so many others, maybe I wouldn't have been able to launch myself into lawprofessordom.

Admitting I'd lost that empowering Pelikan, I went to the University Bookstore, which had a glass case full of pens. I chose a Mont Blanc pen that (like the old Pelikan) had a 14k gold nib. It never flowed quite the same way, but for a while it handled the thick India ink. It got me through Amsterdam. And it worked for the 1996 political conventions:




Those were different times. Different... and the same. An expert could observe that the delegates didn't respond much to foreign policy because "We have no enemies." An interviewer could be surprised that a journalism expert watched not only C-SPAN and the networks, but had the Internet going too. And yet Democrats were railing about guns in terms of military-style weapons and the only decent use being hunting, and Republicans wanted to intone a list of traditional values.

But the Mont Blanc got draggy after a few years of India ink. The whole point of the fountain pen was to transcend friction while leaving a super-solid line, to make it as easy as possible for you your hand and, simultaneously, your eyes. I wanted that feeling of ease. I wanted the Pelikan I had in law school! I switched to disposable India ink felt-tip pens. Those scraped over the surface of the paper in such a horrible cloddy way that it pains me to look at the notebooks I made with them, like this image of a bust of Voltaire, seen at the Louvre (and blogged before, with complaints about the pen):



I'd forgotten — and that old post reminds me — that I did later buy another Pelikan pen and then, immediately lost it. It was hard not to believe it would turn up, and then, gradually to shift into thinking I only deserved a good fountain pen if I could find that one, which is surely somewhere in the house. Then I got to blogging and digital photography and paid less and less attention to not drawing as a problem.

And yet, today, I was walking along the lake path — my favorite walk — thinking about leaving lawprofessordom — Altexit — and thoughts of the Pelikan returned to my mind. Why shouldn't I buy a new Pelikan? It's easy enough to find on Amazon. No need to go peering into glass cases minded by sales clerks who don't really want to talk about 14k gold nibs and fountain India with someone who cares too much about such things. I ordered the pen. I ordered the ink. I've got plenty of incomplete notebooks.