But what about all that snow?

Flight alert just received via airport WiFi:

NW 247 February 25 ON TIME departs DTW at 7:26 pm arrives MSN 7:41 pm Gate 4

Okay. I'm taking your word for it! Departing Ithaca at 4 pm and hoping not to spend the night in Detroit.

I could have stayed another day in Ithaca. Northwest has some kind of "winter waiver" that lets you change your flight without a penalty. But I have class on Monday, and you don't wuss out about snow when the flights are listed as on time. But there is so much snow!

No snow yet here in Ithaca, where we had fun last night at "cabaret" -- the law school show. Today, we brunched at Mahogony Grill and had some laughs talking about any number of things including the topic "Is America ready for a Satanist President?"

I contemplate whether that's a good topic for my Tuesday NYT column:



We talk about writing, and I go on at some length about that David Foster Wallace essay about Tracy Austin in "Consider the Lobster." John points this out, right above my head:



I say if I was crazy, I'd freak out right now. I'd think I was doomed... or at least destined for a serious encounter with alcohol.

Afterwards, we take a stroll in Ithaca, and someone makes fun of me for half-remembering things. You called Madeline's Marguerite's, and you called the Mahogony Grill the Magnolia Grill, and now you're calling the Commons the Concourse.

We stop to look at a lot of old album covers:



I surreptitiously do some YouTubing... but I'm having some mystifying "file format" problems, so I'll have to add that later.

ADDED:



[Click here if you have trouble playing it in that window.]

UPDATE: I'm now in Detroit and the flight is scheduled to leave on time. I hope to get home soon. Perhaps my car is buried under two feet of snow, but I'm feeling optimistic.

AND: You have the picture above that John took of me. Here's one that I took from the other side of the table:



And John's father Richard Lawrence Cohen was there too. Here's RLC's blog. It's his voice that you mainly hear along with mine on the video clip above, talking about, among other things, the song "Little Boxes."

IN THE COMMENTS: "Of course, it's Badfinger," says Sippican Cottage, who notes a recent comment on a February 7th post that brought up Badfinger and linked to the very picture we're talking about in the video clip. I don't remember clicking on that, and I'm surprised I had a mental image of Badfinger, but rather pleased with myself for having exactly the nugget of information requested on a particular occasion.

"A potent debating strategy: he compares the status quo to the age of al jahiliya, the Arabic term for the barbaric state of pre-Islamic Arabia."

Mohammad Akram Nadwi teaches about the history of women and Islam:

Barring Muslim women from education and religious authority, Akram argues, is akin to the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls alive. “I tell people, ‘God has given girls qualities and potential,’ ” he says. “If they aren’t allowed to develop them, if they aren’t provided with opportunities to study and learn, it’s basically a live burial.”

"The anger was palpable. The objectification was extreme. The clothes were mean. And it was always the men who were responsible."

Robin Givhan writes about the latest Milan fashions. This is a beautifully written article, and yet the central point is one I've seen many times, for decades. The life of a fashion writer is not easy! You have all these complicated details to describe -- "headgear that looked like slabs of plaster that cracked off the ceiling" -- and then when you try to resolve it into some general insight, it's always the same.

"In the end, voters will decide what's off-limits, but I can't imagine that the public will reward the politics of personal destruction."

Laying the groundwork for the argument that anyone who brings up the Clinton impeachment now is not playing fair.

Paradoxically, it was the whole Lewinsky affair that originally made Americans warm up to Hillary Clinton. And since she has started invoking President Clinton's successes as support for her candidacy, how can she presume to righteously exclude the other aspects of his story.

I detect a fantasy of control. Is it fair play to talk about that?

And considering that we liked her most when she lost control of things swirling around her, I wonder what she can do.

"The immortal values of the spirit are above physical life. What sense does life have without these values? What then is it to live?"

"Those who understand this and generously sacrifice their physical life for the sake of good and justice -- how can they die? God is the supreme idea of goodness and justice."

Words that should inspire mistrust.

Thermal image: Althouse at Stella's.

ADDED: A description of Stella's (which I'm reading the next day):

The coffee house ... was opened in the early 1990s. It had an old European feel to it and quickly became the home to brooding writers, cynics, Marxist revivalists, and all other manner of people looking for a dark and smokey place in which to waste away the hours of their lives.

Yes, it's an unusually dark café. When I walked in, I said "Oh, it's the beatnik kind."

Will sensitivity about racism turn racism into a taboo subject?

I don't know what really happened here, but it's been on my mind. Now, I read this. What is going on? I should think that people who care about race would want to open up the discussion, but reactions like these are teaching the lesson that it's risky to bring the subject up at all.

ADDED: I've fixed the links. The first link is supposed to go to a post of mine from yesterday, about an incident at my law school. The second link is about an incident at Duke. There is an eerie similarity between the two stories. Please take the time to read the links and the links within the links to get what I'm trying to say here.

"Who appointed Diane Keaton to the position of National Commissioner for Aging Female Sexuality?"

Oscar asks. One of the commenters theorizes: "Maybe her appeal is that she's as sexy now as she was in 1970s, even if she's never been all that sexy."

The literature professor with the nerve to lecture about books he's only skimmed...

... is selling a lot of copies of "How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read."

“I am surprised because I hadn’t imagined how guilty nonreaders feel,” [Pierre] Bayard, 52, said in an interview. “With this book, they can shake off their guilt without psychoanalysis, so it’s much cheaper.”

Mr. Bayard reassures them that there is no obligation to read, and confesses to lecturing students on books that he has either not read or has merely skimmed. And he recalls passionate exchanges with people who also have not read the book under discussion.

He further cites writers like Montaigne, who could not remember what he read, and Paul Valéry, who found ways of praising authors whose books he had never opened. Mr. Bayard finds characters in novels by Graham Greene, David Lodge and others who cheerfully question the need to read at all. And he refuses to be intimidated by Proust or Joyce.

Having demonstrated that non-readers are in good company, Mr. Bayard then offers tips on how to cover up ignorance of a “must-read” book....

... Mr. Bayard’s most daring suggestion is that nonreaders should talk about themselves, using the pretext of the book without dwelling on its contents. In this way, he said, they are forced to tap their imagination and, in effect, invent their own book.

How bloggerly!

Well... hmmm... I haven't read Bayard's book, so let me say that this makes me think about devising a set of tips for teaching law school without reading the cases. (Me, I feel compelled to reread the cases I teach right before each class, so that there are some cases that I've read closely more than 40 times. Did you know that it's emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is?)

I know one lawprof who's proud of the time -- like, the one time -- that he got to the end of the cases he'd prepared and used the Socratic method to teach the next case, which he'd never read. It went quite well, he says.

Theoretically, it could work especially well, because your actual need to figure out what happened in the case and why it's in the book would drive your questions. But the guilt!

I admit it.

I'm in Ithaca.



I'm here to see the law school show tonight. Unlike NYU (where I went to law school) and Wisconsin, they don't take a comedy sketch approach. It's a music talent show.

The flight out was fine (including the craziness of writing for a deadline and having repeatedly to shut down the laptop for take-offs and landings). It's so much nicer to travel when there aren't any delays. I'd forgotten!

Driving an unfamiliar car around a strange city after a long day is kind of not that fun, but we managed to get out and around and have some dinner at the Lost Dog Café and drinks and dessert at (I think the name was something like) Marguerite's.

Can anyone suggest a good scenic route around the Ithaca countryside?

"Giant rats roam free!"

A PR nightmare for Taco Bell.



I love the person-on-the-street interviews: "I won't eat here again." Good call!

Babies watch television!

Oh, noooooo!

Be sure to watch the video at the link, it's a masterpiece of editing. They savaged this poor mother, purely with her own self-congratulatory words and some pix of her innocent babe.

Let's get some expert opinion about the scourge of television:

"We're in the midst of a huge national experiment on the next generation of children," said Dimitri Christakis, a pediatric researcher at the University of Washington. "We don't know the effects and we're letting them watch."

Oh, please! Tiny kids have been watching TV for over half a century. Here's one of mine circa 1983:



Have values changed? I started watching TV in the 1950s, and my parents never said one negative thing about it. We watched hours of TV every day, including the worst possible crap -- unimaginably bad stuff -- just because there was nothing else on. We'd sit and watch the test pattern:



Our hearts lifted when the sermonette (or whatever it was) finally came on.

The main difference is that they now have super-simple DVDs to give a kid -- in the words of the mother on that video -- "the developmental tools to help her with her development."

I'm mainly concerned about the loss of randomness. These days, they subject kids to things that purport to be scientifically designed to structure their minds properly. That's the "a huge national experiment on the next generation." When are we going to see a class action blaming these things for causing autism or some such disorder?

Kos "is waging a war for ideological purity."

The New Republic, doing badly, cuts back to bi-weekly publication, and the editor Franklin Foer whines about Kos.

"I was so enthralled with the line, I didn't see the ball mark."

"I knew if I hit it left-center, the match would be over. It's my fault for not paying attention to detail."

Yes, but I do love your detail in reflecting on what happened.

"Rudy & Mitt Hem & Haw on Abortion."

My Saturday NYT column is up! (TimesSelect link.)

Subversive thought cascade unleashed by David Geffen.

Bill Kristol says:

Hillary Clinton was cruising along, raising big money, triangulating on Iraq, rounding up supporters who felt they had little choice but to sign on. And then Geffen spoke up. Suddenly Democrats all over the country may be thinking to themselves, "Well, what about that? Why exactly do we have to be for Hillary anyway? Shouldn't we consider some alternatives?"

Once unleashed, this series of thoughts is subversive. So much of the Hillary Clinton candidacy depends on an aura of inevitability, supported by oodles of money and a fear of retribution if you're not on board. But what if she's not inevitable? And what if the retribution isn't so all-powerful?

Amusing.

I note that Kristol calls Maureen Dowd "the New York Times gossip columnist."