Althouse: fog

"... but also reversing expectations. Poor people, who could not afford to light their rooms, suddenly found the street lighter and brighter than their homes and occupied the streets at night in a manner that the authorities found disconcerting. A device conceived in part as a mechanism for control and crime prevention inadvertently encouraged a night-time economy not always considered desirable. Covent Garden, now a tourist centre, housed hundreds of much-frequented brothels and so-called coffee houses. On the other hand, prints from the 18th and 19th centuries also show people reading beneath the bright lights of the big city, saving their eyes from dim domestic candlelight."

Writes Edwin Heathcote, in "From pillar to lamp post: lighting city streets" (The Architectural Review).

The article is from 3 years ago. I found it this morning because I googled "history of lampposts" after looking through my morning fog pictures....

... and saying out loud, "Remember when lampposts were beautiful?"

Wrote Adam Liptak of the NYT, in "One Justice Missing and Only One Masked, the Supreme Court Returns/As a term packed with major cases begins, much has changed since the last in-person arguments took place in March 2020."

The justices asked questions in the familiar free-for-all fashion that has long been their practice. But they supplemented such free-form questioning with an opportunity for justices to ask questions in order of seniority one by one after each lawyer argued, replicating the format the court used in the telephone arguments while it was exiled from its courtroom.

Interesting. I wonder if they worried that the free-for-all was systemic racism. I think they need to, even though they only have the ultra-small sample of one black person in the group.

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Who was that masked Justice? Sonia Sotomayor.

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That article went up on Monday, but I'm only just getting around to reading it this morning. The first day of the Supreme Court term feels much less eventful to me than it used to. The break between the end of one term and the beginning of the next seems short. And they do weigh in on things during the interval. Do we miss them when they're (more or less) gone?

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Justice Breyer — my favorite Justice based on the way he talks — asked a question about San Francisco fog:

“Suppose somebody came by in an airplane and took some of that beautiful fog and flew it to Colorado, which has its own beautiful air. And somebody took it and flew it to Massachusetts or some other place. Do you understand how I’m suddenly seeing this and I’m totally at sea?"