"Women can be hilarious... but fewer of them bother trying because they don’t get the same rewards for it."

Says John Tierney. And by "rewards," he means sex. It's evolution talk, of course. You wouldn't "bother" to be funny just because you like to be amused. If you want to be amused and you're female, it's less trouble to dispense sexual favors and get some guy to go to the bother of being funny. That's the theory. I'm not giving advice, just rephrasing the theory.

IN THE COMMENTS: Galvanized makes a good point about aesthetics:

Women, in conversation, are very aware of being judged by their appearance and, thus, feel others find them most attractive when they are smiling and/or laughing and most at ease in being reactive. To be funny sometimes requires affectation of the expressions, voice and body that may not be physically flattering. God forbid! LOL Men, on the other hand, understand that their wit and intellect are socially valued -- the content they contribute in conversation -- and, thus, feel the need to draw attention (strut their stuff in a comedic way when their physique alone doesn't draw), and what better way to draw out a positive reaction than through humor? It's all part of the dance. Comedy is a beta male's best response to an alpha's dominance because, hey, they all gotta find a mate. In the end, we all know that women are just as entertaining, but many women simply feel that leaving the comfort zone and being funny compromises beauty and therefore opt in favor of being aesthetically pleasing rather than intellectually stimulating. Plus, like it says, we just don't have to because we're not usually the initiators and can sit back and watch. In short, women are taught early on (sadly) that funny is not pretty, comedy is not becoming, shtick is unflattering, and also to wait to be approached and hope to be noticed. To court reactions with humor seems to be doing the male's job.

Some, however, do feel secure enough in their looks and risk it or just don't care and buck the system. I do believe, however, that it's innate behavior of the sexes, with some exceptions, thank God. Many women will always be overly conscious of their appearance because our instincts tell us that beauty draws, as many men will always believe that they are socially superior because that arrogance assists them being the initiators. But, again, I appreciate the exceptions to the theory.

She's speaking in terms of learned behavior, but I assume you could present easy laughter as something that would be selected for in evolution.

Downtown Madison, on St. Patrick's Day.

So I go downtown today, and of course, it's St. Patrick's Day, but I'm just looking for a little walk and a stop someplace where I can read the newspaper and drink some coffee. Still, I had my camera, and there were things to see.

Down at the campus end of State Street, it's looking like this:



Cooking up a peace march, apparently.



But up at the Capitol end of the street, there's a different crowd:



With a different attitude:



The sun is shining. The parade is about to begin. First, the pipers:



Then, the 132nd Army Band Wisconsin National Guard:

"It's crazy. It's like having a mini-constitutional convention every time you pick a Supreme Court justice."

Says Justice Antonin Scalia.

You may also be interested to know that he reveals what he thinks about whether Congress has the power to regulate marriage: "No, I don't see anything in there. I don't see any authorization of the federal government to do that." So presumably, in Scalia's view the Defense of Marriage Act, which among other things, absolves states of the obligation to respect same-sex marriages made in other states, is unconstitutional. Someone asks the obvious follow-on question whether the Constitution obligates a state to recognize another state's same-sex marriages, and he judiciously holds his tongue.

How the candidates fare in the YouTube marketplace of ideas.

The statistics are right there for everyone to see. We don't care much about the official campaign videos they are dumping over there. We want to see them in their unplanned comic moments.

... Clinton's most watched HillCast, titled "Roadmap Out of Iraq," comes nowhere close in popularity to the video showing her singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" off-key at a rally in Iowa. The HillCast has been viewed more than 15,000 times since it was posted on Feb. 17, the out-of-tune moment nearly 1.1 million times since its posting on Jan. 27.

I'd be worried sick about human nature if it were the other way around.

And what we really love is a guy like James Kotecki:

Several times a week, Kotecki, a self-described "political geek" turned YouTube celebrity, advises presidential candidates on their campaign videos -- from his dorm room at Georgetown University....

Kotecki has one recurring message to the candidates and their expensive media advisers: "The Web isn't TV." As in, Web viewers don't expect to be spoken to, they expect to be spoken with. It's a passive experience vs. an interactive one.

"The Web isn't TV." That's profound -- I mean, with respect to YouTube. YouTube looks like just an easy place to put stuff that would be on TV (if only it were way better or paid for or something). What makes YouTube not TV? The searching and sorting mechanisms, linkability, embeddability, displayed statistics and comments, the ability of viewers to put up response videos, like Kotecki's...

Let's watch some Kotecki:



Actually, Kotecki is a little too scripted and artificial for my taste. But I love the idea of this genre, talking back to the campaign videos. If the candidates do what Kotecki wants and talk back to the talk back, it's going to get mighty talky, and the candidates might get suckered into talking too much to people who are really only a sliver of the electorate. So many dangers lie ahead. So many bloggable dangers. Vloggable dangers!

Why, one could vlog advice to Kotecki about how his videos are a little too scripted and artificial. And there's another thing about the difference between the web and TV. You can't tumble into infinite regress on TV.

ADDED: Kotecki stops by the comments and defends himself against the charge that he's too scripted. Here's Kotecki's blog. Whatever I said about taste in vlog-styles, I have to approve of his taste in templates.

Here's Koteck talking with Jeff Jarvis about campaign videos.

Hey, Glenn's back.

He says we guestbloggers did our "usual topflight job," but he reveals that he got "a few grumpy emails" from readers who don't like him to be away, and he's got to know that Richard Brookhiser was all:

Instapundit - Glenn Reynolds = 0
Nothing is harder than simple.

It's irksome the way Brookhiser assumes that the assignment was to imitate Glenn. But that is a problem with guestblogging. It gives the impression that you are trying to be the same as the person you're filling in for, and you know a lot of readers will judge you by your failure to do what you may or may not be trying to do. So maybe you do sort of try not to disappoint them, but you're also trying to use the opportunity to show them what you are. But then you are Hybrid You. You don't want to be Hybrid You, you want to be You You, and you want Richard Brookhiser to love you, right? You know, I'm just kicking myself. I forgot to ask WWRBLTR.

ADDED: And it goes without saying -- though it's not nice to leave it unsaid -- that I'm really happy to get to read Glenn again, and I feel honored to have been asked to guestblog again.

Thinking about Professor Kingsfield again.

Writing the previous post, I ran across a couple of bloggers who talked about going back to my Kingsfield column in the NYT a few weeks ago. (TimesSelect link.) I described a talk by John Jay Osborn Jr., the author of "The Paper Chase," and wrote:

... Osborn says [law students] hate law school, and they hate it because the law professors don’t care about what the students think. “You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer,” said Osborn’s sadistically Socratic professor, Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. This legal discipline deprives students of “their own narrative,” as Osborn put it, and they need to learn how to struggle, as Osborn’s protagonist Hart did, to “reclaim” it. They need to resist what law school tries to impose....

Here's Greg, a law student who actually has had Osborn as his lawprof:

Because Prof. Osborn didn't cold-call, didn't even assign people to be "up" for a particular class, it was the narrative of a few that we heard most from.

This is the #1 problem with relying on volunteers. I, myself, have used volunteers through most of my 20+ years teaching law. It is more relaxed and does give you the good feeling that you're not intruding on anyone. But of course, you are. You're intruding on the minds of everyone in the room, even if they are passive and silent. They may avoid the fear and pressure of getting put on the spot, but that doesn't mean they're having a fine time listening to the students who enjoy engaging with the professor. Osborn wants to empower students to "reclaim" their "personal narrative" in class, but you've got to picture that in practice. Just because the opportunity is offered doesn't mean the students will respond in proportion to their need for personal empowerment or the value of their personal narrative to the classroom experience. Most likely, the students who bring the most empowerment to class will do the most talking. These may be the extroverts or the students who came from families or great schools that got them comfortable with exposing their minds. Having to listen to these already-empowered students may very well disempower the students who are more introverted or whose families did not debate politics at the dinner table or whose high schools were substandard holding pens. It may strengthen some students over others -- perhaps males over females or white students over minorities students. If we care about diversity, we need to worry about a teaching method that activates some and not others. Even if you rankle at "diversity" talk like that and prefer to think in terms of individuals, you should care about systematically empowering some individuals over others. Well, if you rankle at "diversity," you probably hate "empowering" too, but the point remains! If you're going to have a classroom where students do some of the talking, it's best to get the full range of students talking, especially if the students are going into a field like law, where speaking is going to be part of the work. Here's another law student blog post, from Aaron of The Stopped Clock:

One of the best student experiences I had in law school was being taught by J.J. White, who was probably the most like Professor Kingsfield of any professor at UM. He knew his material cold, and I had the impression that he spent more time reviewing cases and preparing for each class than did most of his students.... Had every professor at UM been like him, I would have had to work a lot harder and I would have learned a lot more.

Aaron's post is pretty rambling and entails an awful lot of personal narrative. It's hard to tell what he's driving at. And then it ends with a question for me. Hey, Aaron, I'm the lawprof. I'm the one who wants a neo-Socratic revival. That is, I'm the one with the questions. No answers for you! By the way, I love Prof. Osborn, who sent me a nice note about the NYT column, in which he cleverly pointed out that I used personal narrative and told my own story in the column. He's quite right! Here I am, leading up to a conclusion that rejects the idea of opening up the classroom to students telling their own stories:

When I was applying to law schools in 1977, I really didn't need an anti-authoritarian novel about a young guy who lets a love affair with the professor's daughter eat into his study time. I was married and -- it seemed then -- a little old for that sort of frippery. I was 26. What I needed was to get serious after years of underemployment inspired by books and movies about defying authority. I had to set aside that obsolescent hippie balkiness and adopt a pragmatic attitude for the task ahead. ''One L'' -- which was new then -- laid out the facts about law school and got you just scared enough to fire you up for the challenge.

And of course, "One L" is a personal narrative too. (And where's my letter from Scott Turow?!) I'm not against personal narrative. As a blogger, could I be against personal narrative? Actually, I could. A blog could be much more personal than this, and it could also be utterly impersonal. Like a law school class, you've got to choose where you want to pitch it. Unlike a law school class, you've got a full range of choice. I think it would be downright abusive to make my law school class as personal as this blog... and to make this blog as personal as it could be... well, that would be crazy, wouldn't it? Or are you just waiting for the day when I lay my inhibitions aside and tell you what I really think... and what I really do?

"Distorted rumors" of a law school class.

Cap Times columnist Joel McNally restirs the pot on the UW Law School Kaplan controversy and quotes my NYT column from two weeks ago. He also evokes my column from the week before that -- read it in TimesSelect -- which speaks more generally about teaching law school and challenging law students beyond their comfort zone. I had just heard a talk given by "Paper Chase" author John Jay Osborn Jr., and I was using the book "The Paper Chase" and the character Professor Kingsfield to say something about what we lawprofs should be doing today. McNally on Kingsfield:

Kingsfield was the fictional version of a real-life Harvard law professor who instilled such icy terror in the hearts of his students that one of them turned the experience into "The Paper Chase," a best-selling novel and popular film in the 1970s.

Actually, according to Osborn, Kingsfield wasn't a real professor. He was a fictional concoction, to provide drama. Osborn's own contracts professor was quite lovable. Here's McNally on the Kaplan controversy:

... Madison law professor Leonard Kaplan... somehow finds himself having to defend a lecture that apparently unintentionally offended some Hmong students who may or may not know what was really said. What prompted the uproar was an e-mail circulated by a Hmong student who wasn't in the class. The student later admitted her e-mail "wasn't well-informed," but that she still found whatever was said in the class offensive. Other minority students, who actually did hear Kaplan's remarks in the class, said the e-mail took portions of Kaplan's lecture out of context. They said Kaplan had described racial stereotypes that had been used against Hmong people in a discussion of how the law can conflict with different cultures. In a letter to the dean of the Law School, Kaplan said: "Had I made the hateful comments strongly attributed to me, I would repudiate them without hesitation. I did not make them." But apparently it doesn't matter that the complaint against Kaplan "wasn't well-informed," as his accuser now says. The Law School is scrambling. The university is scrambling. We hear the sort of vacuous apologies that have become familiar in recent years. If anyone was offended, all sorts of folks are officially deeply sorry. What's really offensive is a university that worries more about how students react to distorted rumors of what a professor might have said instead of what was really said or what he was trying to teach his students.

I think McNally has carefully phrased this, but do want to call attention to two things that might be a little hard to see. First, the concession that the email reporting supposed quotes "wasn't well-informed" doesn't mean that their complaint lacks substance. Second, the university has taken an interest in what really happened. While "distorted rumors" may have inflamed emotions, there are still real students who had sat through the class who are talking with administrators about what they had perceived. There is no way to go back and see what happened in a situation that wasn't recorded. In a sense, you could say that anyone's report of what was said in the past is somehow "rumor," but that's not very helpful. Indeed, the students' first-hand reports of what they heard in class are not even hearsay in the legal sense of the term (because it is not offered to prove the truth of the matter asserted, only to prove what was said). I'm not looking to restir the pot here myself, just linking to McNally because I've been linking to the mainstream media's coverage of this story all along. McNally is saying something very close to what I've been saying, which you can read by clicking the "Kaplan story" label below. There is a serious conflict and a lot of well-intentioned individuals attempting to resolve it right now. I wish them well.

It's that day when I say...

Happy Birthday to John!



Happy St. Patrick's Day to the rest of you!

Flickr collections.

I love the new "collections" feature in Flickr. Here are mine.

Go Badgers.

I just got the email saying that they're projecting the basketball game on the big screen in room 2211 at the law school. I hope everyone's happy and stays happy.

"It was over in an instant. That career path was terminated."

Valerie Plame testifies.

UPDATE: The AP report is rather harsh:

She revealed little new information about the case, which sparked a federal investigation and brought perjury and obstruction of justice convictions of Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. No one has been charged with leaking her identity.

Still, Plame's appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was a moment of political theater that dramatized Democrats' drive to use their control of Congress to expose what they see as White House efforts to intimidate dissenters....

News cameras whirred and spectators craned their necks to catch a glimpse of Plame as the blond former operative took her place alone at the witness table for her 90 minutes of testimony.

The one significant thing seems to be this:

Plame said she did not select her husband for a CIA fact-finding trip to Niger. Wilson later wrote in a newspaper column that his trip debunked the administration's prewar intelligence that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Africa.

"I did not recommend him. I did not suggest him. There was no nepotism involved. I did not have the authority," she said.

That conflicts with senior officials at the CIA and State Department, who testified during Libby's trial and told Congress that Plame recommended Wilson for the trip.

That's a conflict to be resolved. Is it anything or do the words "recommend" and "suggest" have some subtle meaning that will be revealed later, erasing the conflict? That's just mystifying.

"The 20 Worst Cover Songs in Pop Music History."

According to Cracked. Can't trust Cracked? They have the videos to prove it.

Some of these are new to me. For example, I didn't know Hillary Duff sang "My Generation," let alone that she changed the words to "hope I don't die before I get old." Actually, I think Cracked is revealing too much of a distaste for young women singing guys' songs. And not enough of a sense of... odd for Cracked... humor. I think Britney Spears singing "Satisfaction" is pretty amusing. Of course, I'm just watching it once, not having it inflicted on me repeatedly. But I think a bit of a mismatch in a cover song is nice.

And does Cracked have a conservative slant? Read this (about Counting Crows doing "Big Yellow Taxi"):

We absolutely loved the way that lead singer Adam Duritz (the hairy Fraggle wearing the arty-fart Dr. Seuss hat in the video) changed up the phrasing to make it more liberal than the original Joni Mitchell version. Because if there's one thing that Joni Mitchell could've improved on, it was being more liberal. That made all the difference to us. We've since started buying organic apples.

More liberal phrasing? I don't know... You listen to it. I can't.

On the radio.

Here's a radio interview with me... about blogging.

"In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people."

An editorial in today's NYT:

In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud. But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings.

In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system....

There is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country. Rather, Republicans under Mr. Bush have used such allegations as an excuse to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning groups....

These are very harsh charges. I want to know more. If there really is "no evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country," is there some evidence of something less that "rampant" fraud that deserved investigation? Should we simply equate concern about voter fraud with Republican politics and, further, link that to hostility to the poor and minorities. This is a dramatic, bulky, bulgy packaging of issues!

And don't forget: Rove is at "the epicenter of the imbroglio"! So, I see: there's a big aura of suspiciousness to all of this. All I'm saying is, let's unpack the parts and try to understand what happened.

ADDED: I think the evidence of voter fraud here in Wisconsin is quite convincing.

Let's talk about AutoAdmit.

If you've come here because some blogger has informed you that this post shows me in a contradiction, you need to read the UPDATE below.

Over on Instapundit, I wrote:

DEFENDING AGAINST REPUTATION DEFENDER. If you followed the AutoAdmit controversy -- see this WaPo article -- you should check out this response from Jarret Cohen of AutoAdmit. Where do I stand on AutoAdmit (a website where law students and prospective law students sometimes talk raunchily about particular individuals)? Well, my original response to the WaPo article was somewhat supportive in the face of what I thought were demands for too much repression, but then I Googled "althouse autoadmit" to find my old post for that link, and check out what came up first. Now, I've got to laugh and say yes, this is life here on the internet, but I'm old and I have tenure. I really do see how something like this can disturb a young woman who's in the job market, though I still don't think law firm partners are dumb enough to take obvious junk like this seriously in hiring decisions. (And given this attitude, I couldn't get too steamed when feminist bloggers railed about my failure to exhibit proper deference to the fears and feelings of women.)

If you want to talk about all this, come over to my blog, where I'll set up a post with comments.

This is that post, so talk.

ADDED: To the fool who thinks that the post about me on AutoAdmit made me see the problem a different way: You are utterly and completely wrong! Learn to read, fool.

UPDATE: I see this post has been linked again by someone who thinks he's discovered some amazing inconsistency between this and my earlier post. But this blogger is wrong and is either vicious or a poor reader. Let me spell it out for people who don't know how or won't take the time to understand something that is written in a sharp, short style.

(So, really, to my readers who understand, don't bother with what I'm about to write. It's in a style that doesn't represent what I'm trying to do here.)

Some people seem to think that my position in this post shows me changing my position and becoming more sympathetic as result of reading a thread on AutoAdmit that was about me. These people are absolutely wrong. Let me spell out why they are wrong.

My position was originally and has remained that I simply do not believe what was in the Washington Post article: the theory that some Yale Law students failed to get the jobs they wanted because some nasty boys expressed sexual thoughts about them on a website called AutoAdmit.

I never said the boys who expressed those thoughts were wonderful. I was concerned that the women were overreacting and inclined toward the repression of free speech. I don't think you can control the internet the way you might control speech in a school or workplace (using a "hostile environment" theory).

In the Instapundit post, I drew attention to the thread about me to demonstrate my own ability to laugh, to accept the internet for what it is, and not to react with demands for repression. That is, I was modeling what I believe to be the right Free Speech position.

I then concede that my demonstration of the right attitude is not as strong as it would be if I were younger and had job insecurity. I anticipated a reader who would say, sure, it's easy for you to laugh it off, you're not in the same position as those women.

I wanted to make it clear -- though when you have bloggers standing by to denounce you, you can never be clear enough -- that I knew my demonstration of how to laugh it off was not fully convincing, because it's easier for me to laugh at what I think they should laugh at too.

I "really do see" that a "young woman" -- that is, a woman with less experience learning how to deal with life's hard knocks -- might be "disturbed." Being disturbed doesn't mean you are justified in making causal connections between the things that disturbed you and other problems you are having in life, like not getting the job you wanted. And being disturbed doesn't mean you ought to have the power to control the things that are disturbing you.

To say that I can understand how something disturbed you doesn't mean I think you're better off getting disturbed than laughing it off the way I did. It just means I'm not going to criticize you for not having the ability to laugh it off. But I still do think that you should.

"An ambiguously worded political compromise written hundreds and hundreds of years ago."

That's Matt Yglesias on the U.S. Constitution. Hundreds and hundreds? It would have to be at least 400 years old to justify "hundreds and hundreds."