Using Amazon's "Popular Highlights" feature to see whether the books people bought are actually getting read.

"Every book's Kindle page lists the 5 passages most highlighted by readers," notes Jordan Ellenberg in The Wall Street Journal. If the highlights come from all over the book or near the end, it suggests people are actually reading it. When the highlights all come from the beginning, they probably are not.

Ellenberg — who's a UW-Madison math prof — does some calculations and declares that the most unread book of the summer is Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century":

Mr. Piketty's book is almost 700 pages long, and the last of the top five popular highlights appears on page 26.

At the Blue Sky Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

How should Obama respond to Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College?

Now that the Supreme Court has shown how seriously it intends to take RFRA-based demands for exemptions to contraception coverage, Obama has many things to consider. As the NYT puts it, he's going to pay attention to getting no-added-copay contraception to women. But there's also the politics:

Still, the administration has another motivation to act as quickly as possible: It is eager to court the votes of women dismayed by the rulings. The Democratic National Committee is already urging voters to fight back against the Hobby Lobby decision and to “stand up for Obamacare” in the November elections.

Of course, political advantage will be taken. This issue is served up nicely for Democrats. What can Republicans do? Personally, I recommend that the federal government directly pay for all birth control. Take the employers, all employers, out of the process of funding birth control and make it a straightforward public health program.

You know, we ought to be glad that women control their reproductive function to the extent that they do. We can't force women to use birth control. We should at least facilitate the voluntary behavior that benefits all of us. It's ridiculous that we've stumbled into a position where this perfectly wholesome governmental policy is bedeviling religious people.

Behind that "Hillary Clinton Says She’s Donated All University Speaking Fees" headline.

I didn't bother clicking through when I saw that running as the top headline all day yesterday. It was the 4th of July, and when I think of the 4th of July, I don't wonder what's the latest on the Clintons. But now it's the 5th of July, and that headline — which has left quite the impression by now — is still reigning atop Memeorandum.

Finally reading it, I'm irritated at Hillary and outraged at the new media outlets who put the headline in that form, which is missing the fact that flips the story: Hillary Clinton donates the money to her own foundation.

Here's the ABC News piece under the headline quoted above:

“All of the fees have been donated to the Clinton Foundation for it to continue its life-changing and life-saving work. So it goes from a foundation at a university to another foundation,” Clinton said when asked about the criticism she and her husband have faced recently for their wealth.

What is her salary from the foundation? How much of her expenses are covered by family foundation money? How many members of her family make salaries from that foundation? To what extent is the foundation an income tax dodge? And didn't Hillary Clinton recently portray herself as not truly rich because she and Bill pay income tax on their money?

Taking from your foundation and putting it in my foundation... what a lovely, arrogant metaphor for a liberal's view of government! I can spend your money better than you can. The universities have money that they might spend to improve education for their students and to advance scholarship, but it could be shifted into the Clinton Foundation which does whatever it does, some charitable things that maintain and advance the Clintons' political fortunes. 

In my post about a "spurious teaser," I ended with a spurious teaser of my own.

The topic was a Women's Studies professor who gave extra credit to students who wore their body hair in a non-gender-normal way and wrote about their experience. Last line of the post:

Maybe you think body hair is too trivial of a topic to study at the college level, but I believe there is no more profound subject in human civilization than the female body. It is the central focus.

At the end of a long chain of comments, I'm seeing sojerofgod, who says:

Ann is right and all the rest of you bozos are wrong.

Ok, just kidding about the bozo part.

The truth everyone seems to be missing is that for the last 99.999% of the history of Man, women have been the focus of civilization for a very simple reason: No women = No future.

Happy 4th of July!

All photos by Meade, taken tonight in Boulder, Colorado.

"Yay! Life!"

"Got Mead."



Seen in the last few days in Boulder, Colorado.

"University Offers Female Students Extra Credit For Not Shaving Armpits."

There's a spurious teaser at Drudge, and it goes to a Campus Reform headline that's virtually the same: "University offers female students extra credit for not shaving their armpits." In the interest of brevity, Drudge trusted us not to picture female students shaving other people's armpits.

So did female students really get extra credit for not shaving their armpits, and did male students not get an equivalent extra credit offer? No and no.

The extra credit assignment was to do something nonconformist with your body hair as an experiment and to write about it. Not shaving armpits and — I take it — displaying those hairy armpits to see if people shun you or make remarks is what the females had to do to transgress the gender norm. Actually, they also had to grow in their leg hair.

Male students had to something different to transgress the gender norm. They had shave all their body hair from the neck down and, again, write about it.

The professor, Arizona State University's Breanne Fahs, teaches in the area of Women and Gender Studies and her writings include material specifically about body hair:

Breaking body hair boundaries: Classroom exercises for challenging social constructions of the body and sexuality. Feminism & Psychology.

Shaving it all off: Examining social norms of body hair among college men in a women’s studies course. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Is there something wrong with her assignment? You might think it's a bad idea for students to put their scarce college time into courses on gender studies, but these were students who chose Fahs's course. Or is there a gender studies requirement? I observe that Arizona State has something called The School of Social Transformation. My point is: Once you've come this far, and you're in this women's studies class, do you have any real basis to object to what is only an optional assignment?

I could see some objection based on the variable difficulties of not shaving. Did the women get an easier assignment then the men? Did any students have religious scruples about the preservation or nonpreservation of body hair or about displaying the parts of the body that would need to be seen to prompt the reactions you needed to get to do the writing?

ADDED: Maybe you think body hair is too trivial of a topic to study at the college level, but I believe there is no more profound subject in human civilization than the female body. It is the central focus. 

"Who Are The Mysterious Forces Behind The 'Draft Mitt' Movement?"

A Talking Point Memo headline for a piece by Dylan Scott, who doesn't actually call anything "mysterious." We noticed Scott a couple weeks ago, writing under another TPM headline that caught my eye: "George Will's Rape Column Was Edited By A Bunch Of Men."

Scott's new piece fixates on the "Draft Mitt" website, which has only collected 28,000 names of Romney 2016 people, which is close to nothing.

But it's not nothing.

Which begs the question: Who's running this conservative (and low-budget) version of Ready for Hillary? That's the rub: Nobody seems to know.

Not nothing... begs the question (used incorrectly as usual) ... [There's] the rub... The clichés dribble out as Scott endeavors to make something out of virtually nothing.

Contacted by TPM via its Facebook page... an anonymous presence behind the site replied, saying the group "consists largely of former Romney campaign workers and donors."

But the site wouldn't disclose the names of these characters — or "forces" (to use TPM's word) — so I guess that's a bit "mysterious."

Back in April, we talked about rumors that Mitt Romney might run again. I said:

Why couldn't he win if he ran not because he was a sore loser and felt entitled or ambitious, but because he's a modest, dutiful man, called into service in a time of need?

Which is why the draft Romney step is helpful.

And take into account that the opposing candidate is quite likely to be Hillary Clinton, who was so much the front runner in '04 that her failure to get the nomination makes her seem like a previous loser, and that prior loss seems more loser-ish than Romney's 2012 loss, since Hillary was a frontrunner who got blindsided by an upstart, and Romney had an uphill battle against an incumbent. (And wouldn't Romney have won if he'd kept up the first debate aggressiveness in that second debate?)

I took a poll:

Best $10 bargain ever... purchased from the federal government.

Last night's "Snow on July 3rd" post had 3 photographs taken at the Rocky Mountain National Park. Here's one more, showing a boy standing on top of a cool rock formation near the highest point in the park.



It was the first time I'd gone to a national park since turning 62, the age at which you can purchase a lifetime pass — for you and everyone who's in the car with you — for $10. A regular day pass — per car — is $20. Thanks, federal government.

And, now, it's the 4th of July. Another beautiful day in the United States of America.

Snow on July 3rd.

"Clad in outfits fashioned from the football-sized leaves of the skunk cabbage plant..."

"... they play an odd medley of instruments—trombones, kazoos, pots and pans—as they march forward, then backward down Elk Avenue, the main street in this Rocky Mountain ski town...."

As the cacophony swells, they chant letters spelling out four words: "Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory."...

The tradition... began in the summer of 1984... Two students started it...

The point of the costumes was to "be risqué in a biological way. Veratrum is just the plant that's everywhere out here, and has big enough leaves to make it possible to wear," [said Ecology professor Dirk H. Van Vuren]....

The original manifestation of this costume concept was nakedness underneath. One of the 2 founding students said: "People started running up at the end and tearing our skirts off of us... People were wowed. That was the best time I ever had at a parade."

Don't let the word "skirts" make you picture a female getting her clothes ripped off, wowing others thereby, and proclaiming it a great time. That was a guy, and now he's got it in the Wall Street Journal that "people were wowed" at whatever they saw.

These days the parade is "more family friendly" and "people just kind of attach veratrum to whatever they're wearing."

There's also the "RMBL Forward-Backward Marching Band," originated in 1976 by biologist Nickolas Waser who was "cynical about the political scene, so I think it had an additional meaning of marching forward and backward into the third century of the U.S." They played things like the Mickey Mouse Club song ("Who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me...."). You can see how that would make for a mockery of patriotism. That's how some people feel about the 4th of July, but we're told it's "more family friendly" now, and I don't know what that extends to other than having a bathing suit under your skunk cabbage garb.

"If congressional Republicans had even minimal institutional trust in the president, Mr. Obama would be able to assemble a majority to pass immigration reform."

"He can't, or won't, and so he rants. More than a few Americans watching parades pass by this weekend will recall that one man's whim as the way we make laws has no support in the U.S. Not now, not ever."

Writes Daniel Henninger in a Wall Street Journal piece. (If you don't have a subscription, google some of that text and you'll get in on a free pass.)

Henninger is more sanguine about Boehner's lawsuit than I am, but he is right, I think, to point to the Supreme Court's recent resistance to the expansion of executive power and to question what seems to be Obama's idea: If Congress won't give him want he wants, that justifies executive power to do what needs to be done.

"[My abortion] was too traumatic for me to make art of."

Writes Lisa Selin Davis, in a NYT "Private Lives" piece. Davis had "essentially majored in experimental feminist video" in college, believed she "could make art out of anything," and saw her unplanned pregnancy as "an opportunity."

But then she fails to have the camera running for the dramatic moment when her car service driver, on hearing that he's taking her to her abortion appointment, pulls the car over, on a bridge, in traffic, to say: "Don’t kill the baby."

“Keep driving! I have an appointment!” I shook his headrest. This was not part of the script.

“Please don’t kill the baby,” he said again, turning around to face me. He had beautiful big brown eyes — almost black. “I will take care of you and the baby. I work two jobs.”

We're told this man was "Middle Eastern."

But would she have wanted that scene in her movie? Later, she chose not to turn the camera on in the waiting room, she says, because the women there didn't fit her mental image. She hadn't planned for a baby, and she hadn't planned for "the saturnine cloudiness" of the waiting room and "all those sad-looking women burying their faces in tabloid magazines."

If they'd been reading The New Yorker, would it have had a more feminist vibe — more of a sense of informed, intelligent, autonomous individuals discovering and delineating the meaning of life for themselves?

Describing these women, Davis deadpans, "The video camera stayed sleeping in my lap," as if she could have filmed patients in a clinic waiting room if only they conveyed the message she'd hope to find.

The film prospects are also undercut by the need for general anesthesia. But the writing prospects remain, of course, and that's what we are reading.

The first thing I thought when I awoke from the anesthesia was that I’d never be pregnant again, that I had just squandered my only chance at motherhood.

That's quite a sentence, exposing her to the criticism that she's thinking only of herself. The lost child becomes the lost opportunity to be a mother. The pregnancy was an opportunity to make a feminist film, and with the opportunity to make the film disappointed, the writer shifts us forward to the new lost opportunity, motherhood.

Davis ends upbeat. We jump 20 years into the present, where she's "happily coupled with a wonderful man," and 2 daughters. She still supports abortion rights, but she wants women to know that having an abortion is brutal and traumatic.

I suspect that Davis got the idea to write this piece because of the recent attention to a film that did get made of a woman getting her abortion and presenting abortion in the cheerful, liberating way that had been Davis's original conception.

July landscape.

"I was a virgin to humiliation of that level, until that day" — the day the Starr Report came out — said Monica Lewinsky...

... in a TV interview yesterday.

If you're going with the "virgin" metaphor, I don't think you can have levels. You don't get to be a "virgin" at multiple levels. Unless she'd never been humiliated before — and did Bill Clinton not humiliate her? — then she was not a humiliation virgin at the point when Ken Starr released his dry, detailed descriptions of her interactions with Bill. But it is funny for someone who chose a lot of daring and transgressive sexual activities with our sexy President to attempt to con us into thinking that she lost her virginity to the snoopy prosecutor who enabled the President's constituents to visualize what she had done.