"Although still rare, euthanasia of couples was first noted in a review of all cases in 2020..."

"... when 26 people were granted euthanasia at the same time as their partners. The numbers grew to 32 the following year and 58 in 2022.... Elke Swart, spokesperson for the Expertisecentrum Euthanasie, which grants the euthanasia wish of about 1,000 people a year in the Netherlands, said any couple’s requests for assisted death were tested against strict requirements individually rather than together. 'Interest in this is growing, but it is still rare,' she said. 'It is pure chance that two people are suffering unbearably with no prospect of relief at the same time … and that they both wish for euthanasia.'"

From "Duo euthanasia: former Dutch prime minister dies hand in hand with his wife/Dries and Eugenie van Agt, both 93, died as number of couples in Netherlands choosing joint end to life grows" (The Guardian).

1. "Although still rare...." implies that we know where we're going and it will ultimately be routine.

2. It's a commitment beyond the marriage vow "'Til death do us part." Even death will not part them.

3. Makes me think of that Death Cab for Cutie song — "Love of mine, some day you will die/But I'll be close behind, I'll follow you into the dark..."

4. The claim is that the 2 who apply to depart together are evaluated independently, and their wish to journey together counts for nothing. Should it? A reason to say no is that it's hard to tell which way it should count. There could be too much charity or elevation of the other's interests over one's own. But perhaps that is part of self-definition. If you're allowing euthanasia — you've already gone this far — why deprive the individual of the spiritual aspect of the decision. 

Listen to Ben Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) sing a lot of Beatles songs.

It's one of these coronavirus at-home, live-stream things. It's quite nice:

"What I’ve come to realize is that when it comes to The Bluebook, small changes are made for the sake of making small changes."

Writes Bryan Garner, commenting on the new edition — the 20th edition — of the "Uniform System of Citation" law students are supposed to obsess over.

New law students want their predecessors’ work to look obsolete. It’s the theory first elaborated by the social philosopher Thorstein Veblen: planned obsolescence. Veblen postulated that companies deliberately produce consumer goods that will become outdated after limited use so that consumers will have to buy new items more often.

You see the principle at work with smartphone chargers (your old ones won’t work on your new gear), iPod connections (ditto), lightbulbs and even coursebooks. Legal publishers like frequent editions so as to avoid the forgone profits represented by a secondhand market.

And so it is with The Bluebook. Things shift from edition to edition—every five years or so—in response to nothing but the itch of a new crop of law students to leave their mark on their venerated citation guide.

I'm not convinced that law students feel a desire to "leave their mark" with changes in citation form. Anyone who is meticulous about citation form ought to feel bad about changes that make older volumes of the journal different from the new. The most important thing about form is consistency. Pick a form and then stick to it. I have various things like that on this blog, certain punctuation, capitalization, and grammatical preferences that have been established. The interest in formal consistency now vastly outweighs all the various factors that went into the original decision. For example, I capitalize "Justice" but not "judge." And in a sentence like "The five men blew their nose," I am never going to change that "nose" to "noses," no matter how many times Meade says "Shouldn't that be 'noses'?" I just say, "That's that thing again," meaning that's that point of grammar I resolved long ago.

I wish Death Cab For Cutie had followed my grammatical preference in the lovely song "I Will Follow You Into The Dark," which has the great, but flawed, line: "If Heaven and Hell decide/That they both are satisfied/Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs." If it were "Illuminate the no on their vacancy sign," listeners would be spared the no's/nose homophone. Each afterlife domain has only one sign, and each sign has only one no that can be illuminated when there is no vacancy, so the singular makes sense and avoids confusion. I learned that long ago from a teacher who knew it was better to say to us students "Use your head," not "Use your heads."



But back to "The Bluebook." I think Garner got closer to the truth when he said "Legal publishers like frequent editions so as to avoid the forgone profits represented by a secondhand market." When you're an editor, you have to resist stepping on the writer's stylistic choices. But I'd just like to say, I'd never have written the sentence like that. Garner is using that verbose, 19th century style of rhetoric that W.C. Fields made fun of in the early 20th century. And in doing so, he's making it easier to overlook the truth — what I think is the truth — that is lost in the musings about the psychology of cite-checking law students. I'd have written: The new editions of The Bluebook are a scheme to extract money from students, and students not only pay for new books, they pay in the time and effort it takes to learn the piddling new rules.