The boys are about where they were 30 years ago, but the girls are just on a tear, doing much, much better."

A long detailed piece on the college gender gap:

"[Boys] have a sense of lassitude, a lack of focus," said William Pollack, director of the Centers for Men and Young Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School....

"The roles have changed a lot," said Travis Rothway, a 23-year-old junior at American University, a private school where only 36 percent of last year's freshmen were male. "Men have always been the dominant figure, providing for the household, but now women have broken out of their domestic roles in society. I don't think guys' willingness to work and succeed has changed, it's more that the women have stepped up."...

[S]ome experts argue that what is being seen as a boy problem is actually maleness itself, with the noisy, energetic antsiness and high jinks of young boys now redefined as a behavior problem by teachers who do not know how to handle them....

Still, men in the work force have always done better in pay and promotions, in part because they tend to work longer hours, and have fewer career interruptions than women, who bear the children and most of the responsibility for raising them.

This is a problem we'll never see the end of. We're different. It matters. And yet we do care about about equality, both out of principle and because we need it for a happy life once we have seen the essential truth of that principle.

Guys, you don't have to wear shorts.

Consider kilts:

 

Photographed right here in Madison, Wisconsin, where I also saw this three foot high ceramic sculpture of a finger.

 

No, there's no relationship between the two photographs... except in your mind.

ADDED: What I'm leaving out is a lo-fi video I took of the Prince Myshkins singing about how the Founding Fathers were girlie men. If they email me and tell me to go ahead and upload the video to YouTube and post it, you can be sure I will. "Check out the pleated knee stockings on John Jay... Up jumps John Blair in a puff of powdered hair..." Seriously, email me, guys. That was amusing, but I don't want to violate your copyright.

"I predict that the controlled demolition of our corrupt two-party system by the 9/11 truth movement may begin here in Wisconsin this fall..."

9/11 denialist Kevin Barrett writes a letter to Governor Doyle after Doyle, who's running for reelection, yields to what Barrett calls "political pressure from your right flank."

This is a little political drama being played out in my state, but I note a more general problem mainstream Democrats face setting themselves apart from lunatics these days. The Republicans have some similar problems, chiefly keeping religious fundamentalists from weighing them down. Doyle is doing exactly what serious candidates need to do to appeal to ordinary voters.

"The long-term prognosis is still very, very bleak, and the administration doesn't have any kind of long-term plan."

That's the Democratic response to this news:

An unexpectedly steep rise in tax revenues from corporations and the wealthy is driving down the budget deficit this year, even though spending has climbed sharply because of the war in Iraq and the cost of hurricane relief.

On Tuesday, White House officials are expected to announce that the tax receipts will be about $250 billion above last year's levels and that the deficit will be about $100 billion less than what they projected six months ago....

Tax revenues are climbing twice as fast as the administration predicted in February, so fast that the budget deficit could actually decline this year.

The main reason is a big spike in corporate tax receipts, which have nearly tripled since 2003, as well as what appears to be a big rise in individual taxes on stock market profits and executive bonuses.

From corporations and the wealthy? Okay, frame that.

Tired of email lists.

Here's a message I just sent out to the CivPro and FedCourts email lists:

Well, the time has come for me to shut down the old CivPro and FedCourts email lists. It's been grand. These were among the first -- maybe even the first -- lawprof email lists. But for me -- and maybe for you -- blogging has overtaken writing email. I think blogging is a much better medium of expression. Though email lists retain utility for passing around announcements and getting answers to research questions, I think they are obsolescent as a mode of conversation, which is what interested me in them over a decade ago. After years of dealing with an overflowing mailbox full of bounced messages and address changes, I'm going to go out of the business of list administration.

I'll keep the lists going until fall semester begins. I encourage you to use the lists to make announcements about email lists you have started. Give information about how to subscribe, and the CivPro and FedCourts members can migrate to you. Feel free to talk here about what new lists should exist and who most wants to run them. For example, it might be nice to have a jurisdiction list and a complex litigation list, or some other such division of topics. For me, as soon as I start talking about it in those terms, I think, no, there should be a jurisdiction blog and a complex litigation blog, and these can be group blogs written by the people who have written great messages to these lists over the years. So, please, use the last few weeks of these lists to propose new group blogs and find people who want to work together on them. And promote blogs you already have, as I'm doing here.

Ann Althouse
University of Wisconsin Law School
althouse.blogspot.com

Aren't you tired of email lists?

What's with all those male Supreme Court clerks?

Eugene Volokh asks why are there so many more male Supreme Court clerks than female? His first guess is:

Is the cause possible differences in innate intelligence at the tail ends of the bell curve (what I'd heard called the idiot-genius syndrome, which leads men to be overrepresented both among the very low-IQ and the very high-IQ)?

Oh, please. I know it's in question form, but really...

Obviously, you have to be very smart to make it to Supreme Court clerk, but the behavioral requirements to make it to that position are extremely demanding. I don't know precisely what one needs to do and not do to make it, but I have observed some things in the recruitment of new lawprofs. I'll begin with a shocking revelation: There isn't a single former Supreme Court clerk at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Why? This is a question I've often asked myself. (Maybe Eugene can help me out.) It's not that we don't interview people with this impressive credential. We often do. It's not that they are snubbing us. We end up not making offers. It's uncanny. I don't want to make generalizations about people, so I'm holding my tongue.... holding my furiously typing fingers.

...

I've just spent 15 minutes trying to write the next sentence to that paragraph. I give up! Maybe if I was the Supreme Court clerk type, I'd have framed that damned sentence. Because you need me to. I say no. I won't. Nooooooooooooo. I don't wannaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

ADDED: Amber makes a smart comment here, which makes me feel like a jerk for not linking to her blog post, which Eugene linked to, especially since my previous post here is all about clicking on links. That was soooooo wrong of me. So let's go to Amber's place. I mean, go there. Read the whole thing.

An excerpt:

A well-regarded liberal judge on the same circuit reported nearly identical percentages. Since a circuit court clerkship is essentially required for a Supreme Court clerkship, if fewer women clerk at lower levels, then the pool for Supreme Court clerkships will be smaller. (As a side note, I do find it interesting that comparatively few women clerk. Is this because they want to cash in at the firm for as many pre-baby years as possible? Are women less likely to expect a spouse or lover to follow them to clerkships in remote parts of the United States than men are?)

Maybe a lot of judges really don't want persons who might become pregnant to be clerks. Care to share any stories about judges -- maybe even impeccably liberal judges -- who have revealed their prejudice against pregnancy and motherhood? I could recount a shocking one, but I won't.

On the behaviorial point, which we're discussing in the comments, let me speculate about why women might act and feel very different about being a law clerk. I'm much older than those who are doing clerkships now, but for me, being a clerk is too much like being a secretary. A guy may like the feeling of being someone's right hand man. You can say right hand woman, but it's not a normal phrase. Being a close, subordinate assistant resonates with a long line of inferior positions offered to women.

So that's my speculation: clerking doesn't seem so strikingly advantageous to a woman the way it does to a man. We may want do it because we've been told this is the best path to start your career, but something inside says I don't like the look of myself in that position.

ONE MORE THING: Please connect this discussion to an analysis of the style of writing and reasoning found in Supreme Court opinions.

Clickish behavior.

Dan from Madison has some observations about the click-through behavior of blog readers. I've noticed this myself. You can get linked on a high-traffic blog without seeing much traffic. You could speculate that it's the kind of readers who are drawn to a particular blog. Maybe they just like to hang out with each other and don't want to see what else is out there. Maybe they are just narrow-minded and unadventurous. Or maybe it's something the blogger is doing intentionally.

Kos works to hold readers at his site, by providing lots of places for commenters and diarists. By contrast, Glenn Reynolds won't let you stay long. You can't comment, there's nothing like the Kos diarists, and the posts are really short. What are you going to do? You've got to click on the links. Half the time, you can't even understand the point of his posts unless you click through. Sometimes clicking is irresistible. He's sending you away. Kos, will often quote so much of the post they're linking to that you don't feel you need to bother to click. There, you don't click, you clique.

Talking on the phone, playing with the computer.

Forgive me, but Photo Booth is quite the distraction, even during an interesting phone call. It's the new doodling... and it's so self-absorbed.



UPDATE: And then there's this.

"My hair is like dreadlocks. It's all sticking together."

The iPod as extreme hairstyling tool.

The plot to crack the Holland Tunnel and flood lower Manhattan.

Yes, the terrorists are idiots. That's part of the problem.

Medium Hot.

My, that was a passionate radio show! Were any of you listening? The show was not just about the Supreme Court, but a review of a lot of news stories from the past week. We started off with the controversy I blogged about here: "Teaching 9/11 denial at the UW-Madison." I'll be interested to hear how that sounds when they get the recording up. I felt very fired up and at one point, the other guest, Louis Fortis -- editor-in-chief of The Shepherd Express alternative newspaper and former Democratic state lawmaker -- says that he finds me scarier than the 9/11 denial teacher. Well, why don't you listen and let me know what you think.

Other subjects: Ken Lay's escape from punishment via death, whether North Korea is just trying to get attention, biased coverage on NPR, whether George Bush's visit to Wisconsin will help gubernatorial candidate Mark Green, immigration policy, the two same-sex marriage cases that came out yesterday.

Ah, the archived show can be streamed here now (the 8 a.m. show). Listen!

IN THE COMMENTS: Lot's of good stuff, but I especially love this one -- from Mitch -- about teaching 9/11 denial:

Can we look forward to UWM's Chemistry department offering courses in Phlogiston Theory, or maybe the Almegest will be used as the introductory astronomy text. And let us not forget to include the Progessive teachings of Lysenko in the Biology department. I mean, it's only fair to include opposing viewpoints in the interest of academic freedom.

Barrett's big mistake was wandering from the safe areas of moonbattery and conspiracy theories into the dangerous places where scientific falsifiability can strike down the unwary crackpot. Yes, you are entitled to your opinions and points of view, but you are not entitled to teach what has been proven false. Otherwise, what is the point of teaching anything at all?

"I've been popular before, as president."

"And I've been — people have accepted what I've been doing... Sometimes things go up and down. The best way to lead and the best way to solve problems is to focus on a set of principles. And do what you think is right."

Said President Bush on Larry King last night, as reported by Alessandra Stanley in the NYT, who prefaces that quote with this:

Mr. King's questions rarely rile his guests; instead, his cozy, incurious style encourages them to expose themselves.

And just as Liza Minnelli seemed to come unglued all on her own in her appearance on the show last March, Mr. Bush at times seemed tense and defensive even without needling from his host.

Mmmm.... so.... Bush makes a classic statement about the way he sticks to principle and does not get hung up on popularity, and the association is to please-please-love-me Liza Minnelli and coming unglued?

Well, I wasn't watching and am just reading the cold record. I didn't know this was on. I'm pretty much of a TiVo/HBO-on-Demand kind of TV watcher, and I never know what's on. If there's something I should be catching, somebody has to alert me.

Good morning.

It's a beautiful, cool morning here in Madison, WI. I'm going on the radio in about an hour -- at 8 Central -- to be on Joy Cardin's show on the Wisconsin Ideas Network. So listen in if you can get one of those stations, like WHA (in Madison). We'll be hashing over the Supreme Court term, and you can call in. Or check back for the archived show.

I'm eager to go in to the office, because my new computer needs company. Yesterday, it enjoyed the fulfilling experience of a long hot firewiring with the old computer. Here they are in the heat of passion -- right on the desk!



You can see that the experience jarred the younger one into speaking with a Swedish accent.

And then, I'm predicting, it will be a good day for a lunchtime stroll down State Street. Or I could just set up at some sidewalk café and write, like my colleague, Richard Monette, who looked so casual and elegant yesterday, when I happened to walk by and ask if I could take his picture:

Audible Althouse #57.

A train whistles in the distance. I almost remember a song by The Band. There's a café. A crossword. "Let freedom ring." The tragic Peter Handke. A siren. The documentary "The Staircase." The 70s song "The Americans." A 60s song by the Monkees. "Don't say you love me, say you like me." Walking by the lake. Fireworks. An anecdote about giving money to a beggar and how I react to it when I think it's told by a woman and, later, when I learn it's told by a man. And what should you call a woman, Ms., Mrs., or Miss?

Here's the podcast page. Here's the place to live-stream. And you know damned well you should be subscribing:

Photo Booth.

I need to get out of the office, but I'm fooling around with the new computer. I discovered Photo Booth, which has various psychedelic effects:







Really, I've gotta get out of here....

Where've I been?

Hmmm.... I see it's a hot traffic day here on the Althouse blog. I haven't been monitoring things -- not deleting the comment trolls. I just got a cool new iMac and it's been firewired to the old iMac duplicating virtually everything. It took a while, but when it was over I could restart and have the whole familiar environment on a spiffy bigger, clearer screen. And it's got a built-in camera. Presumably, I'm ready to vlog.