On the radio.

I'm waiting for the call to go on Open Source Radio and talk about Stephen Colbert. I hope Steve's listening!

I'm checking out various websites, trying to get a read on opinion. Are righties slamming him and lefties exulting? Sorry, I'm in the middle on this one. I like the Colbert character, but think it works better in his studio, which symbolizes his cocoon and his self-love. Surrounded by others, he can't really play such a pompous and insular character. It seems desperate, and we worry about him, standing so close to people who must be quite intimidating. It's damned hard to be that good of an actor, but he did pretty well, and it took a lot of nerve.

I'm on around 7:20 Eastern, after Helen Thomas and Noam Scheiber, and along with Michael Scherer of Salon.

But first up is Jay Rosen of PressThink. He was at the event. His theory is that people weren't laughing because the subject of the routine was the administration's disregard for evidence. I can't see why that makes it unfunny. I wonder if Rosen watches "The Colbert Report," since he pronounces the "t" at the end of his name a couple times.

Noam Scheiber, who was also in the room, thinks Colbert was just off that night. He thinks Colbert didn't quite have a grip on his character, and he slipped into ranting criticism of the President, and just didn't have good enough jokes. He notes that Ed Helms (of "The Daily Show") wasn't finding much to laugh at. Only people who "put politics ahead of comedy" are finding a lot to laugh at.

Helen Thomas is saying that one reason people in the room didn't laugh is that they think it's not right to laugh in the President's face.

***

That was fun! Did you listen? And, more importantly, did Steve listen?

***

Now, Robert Thompson is on. He's a TV & pop culture professor. I'm jealous of that job! "The President has now been roasted by one of the coolest, hippest guys in the country," and the President "didn't blow," so "in an odd sort of way," the hipness rubbed off on Bush. Was Bush hurt? No! He got an injection of coolness!, says Thompson.

Then, I got back in at the end. I had to disagree with some assertions about what a new thing criticizing the President and the press is. It might be new to criticize the President when you're a guest at a big event and standing a few feet away from him, but it seems to me Americans have been mocking the powerful and piercing phony rhetoric since before we were a country.

UPDATE: You can stream the show here.

Radio alert!

I'll be on Open Source Radio tonight talking about Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner. You'll be able to listen to it online or download it.

ADDED: The show is from 7-8 Eastern Time. Here's the post I wrote about the performance.

Days, weeks, months, years.

Which of these units of time is not like the others? Weeks! Weeks have no astronomical basis. So why do we have weeks? What are weeks for? Why 7? Because it was written in the Bible. Perhaps hardcore atheists should object to this sevenness.

There were rival weeks, both ancient and modern, including short or long weeks corresponding to market days in some agricultural societies, 10-day weeks in revolutionary France and both five- and six-day weeks in Stalinist Russia.

6?! That's just crazy. I can see wanting to go to 10, but 6? That's just perverse. But there's not much point trying to go all metric with 10, because days and years are determined by overwhelming astronomical facts.

Still, I wonder how different we would be if we hadn't settled on these cycles of 7 days. The rhythm of weeks shapes our moods and activities. We keep going through this short arc of ambition. Tuesdays are crucial, you know? Get cracking! If things don't happen on Tuesday, you feel like giving up. I mean there will be some chance to salvage the week on the Wednesday, but you'll have to do it under the weight of a failed Tuesday.

Man, it's Tuesday. Tuesday! Don't you understand about Tuesday?

But if we had a 10-day cycle, the second day would be just a smooth acceleration day. The third day would have more oomph. The fourth day would add room to really develop the week's accomplishments. Ah, how much potential life would contain, how effective I would be, if only those French revolutionaries had gotten their way!

Shut up! It's Tuesday! Get out of here! I can already see the gaping maw of defeat that is Thursday!

"I don't want to be the guy who calls a borderline walk and ruins this kid's shot at history."

Said the umpire, describing his "nice, big strike zone," and kind of besmirching the record -- 2 perfect games in a row -- as he purports to admire it.

IN THE COMMENTS: "So is this really a comment about Chief Justice Roberts in some way?" Yeah, good point! Damn! I keep forgetting to law blog! I need my commenters to elbow me into it. And here I am baseball blogging? Do I baseball blog?

The Anna Nicole Smith case.

One of the perils of lawprof blogging is that when the Supreme Court issues a decision in your field, posting about it seems compulsory. And this one even has a big hulking celebrity who would ordinarily be fun to write about for almost no reason at all. But I don't wanna to write about the Anna Nicole Smith case.

It's a unanimous opinion about a fine point of a doctrine about which I've never made any class read a single case in over 20 years of teaching Federal Jurisdiction. Suffice it to say: The jurisdiction of the federal courts is defined by statutes. Old case law contains a judge-made exception for probate cases. In the face of a statute that contains no exception and old case law making an exception, what are you going to do? Read the exception narrowly.

When Scalia met Ludacris.

Who knows what all the two men talked about after the White House Correspondents Dinner? All the reporter could wrest out of Ludacris was "Um, we didn't really talk about much." Scalia offered little additional detail: "I just said hello," and "He has a deep voice, doesn't he?"

Is there a left-right division about whether lawprof blogs should stick to law or range over multiple topics?

Eric Muller wonders:

[The] highly successful "mixed" lawprof bloggers all blog from, and to a readership primarily on, the political right....

The couple of genuinely "mixed" lawprof bloggers to the left of center – I'm thinking, I guess, mostly of myself and Michael Froomkin, and I'd probably throw in Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Profs as well -- don't hold a candle to their readership or their influence.

What do I make of that? To be honest, I don't really know. I certainly don't think the legal academy is skewed towards a Republican/conservative viewpoint; it isn't.

The preeminence of right-of-center "mixed" lawprof bloggers may, however, reflect an overall blogospheric tilt to the right; look at the TTLB ecosystem's ten "Higher Beings" and you'll see that seven are blogs from the right, whereas only two are blogs from the left.

Or maybe it reflects something else entirely. I'd be curious to know what you think.

In any case, Larry[ Solum's] thesis – that lawprof bloggers who blog about law as well as lots of other stuff will confuse their readership and drive them away, and that their blogs will therefore fade away – appears to be incorrect, or at least incomplete. Something surely explains why certain "mixed" lawprof blogs are among the most successful blogs in the blogosphere, even among lawprofs and other consumers of legal scholarship, and something surely explains why right-of-center ones do a whole lot better than left-of-center ones.

Obvious and inflammatory theory #1: Lefties are more easily confused.

Obvious and inflammatory theory #2: The flexible, wide-ranging intellect leans right.

Anyway... I think readers like mixed topic blogs more. Remember when Stephen Bainbridge took a vote about whether to put his material about corporate law on a separate blog? The readers strongly rejected the idea.

"Unfortunately, whenever there is talk of social corruption, fingers are pointed at women."

Said Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

"Certain prejudices against women have nothing to do with Islam," he said Friday, several days after lifting the ban [on women's attending sporting events]. The speech seemed to present him for the first time as a supporter of expanded rights for women. "Unfortunately, whenever there is talk of social corruption, fingers are pointed at women. Shouldn't men be blamed for the problems, too?"

That's quite a concession, that men might actually share some of the blame for social problems.

Why the feminist turn for Ahmadinejad? According to the article, it's a play for votes, albeit a risky one.

Notes on television.

Last night, I really wanted to settle in and watch two hours of quality television: "The Sopranos" and "Big Love." I watched the first 20 minutes of "The Sopranos," then turned it off to read until "Big Love" came on. I watched 10 minutes of that, then turned it off and read until I fell asleep. I was tired and not up to the task of watching quality television. So much going on, and you've got to absorb it at the pace they impose on you. Reading is much easier and much more self-indulgent and luxurious. You can drift into your own thoughts at will and return to you old place or skip ahead or back.

But if you're looking for a place to talk about "The Sopranos" and "Big Love," go right ahead and use the comments. Don't worry about spoiling it for me. I prefer the shows spoiled. It removes the distraction of paying attention to the plot points and to see what's really happening, to concentrate on the details. I often watch these shows twice, and the second viewing is always better. That's how you know it's worth watching once.

Recycling the leftovers from the "Person of the Year" analysis.

Time Magazine has another one of its lists: 100 People Who Shape Our World. It always seems as though they're just begging us to bitch about the three or four people who least belong on the list. I'm not going to Technorati this list and see all the bloggers who are exclaiming about Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington.

Re Drudge: "With 10 million readers daily, Drudge, 39, has paved a generous path for the blogs; without his example, semipro scribes might not have unearthed 'Rathergate.'" Does that sound like irksome, backward Time-ese writing? Actually, Ana Marie Cox wrote that.

The writer of the post on Arianna eschewed Time-ese:

No doubt because of my (persuasive) prowess and Arianna's intellectual openness, she switched, becoming a lefty. With her indefatigable persistence, resourcefulness and good humor, Arianna, 55, has gone from ambitious project to ambitious project with varying degrees of success, finding herself the proprietor of the widely read, hugely influential liberal blog Huffington Post. None of this would have happened were it not for me. And it seems oddly ironic that it is Arianna, not I, who has been named one of TIME's 100 most annoying (sorry, influential) people. Arianna should be writing about me.

Me, Al Franken.

Bloggership Linkership.

Ian Best has a comprehensive collection of links about last Friday's "Bloggership" conference. Let's follow some of them.

I see Harvard lawprof Charles Nesson is making a bid for a spot in my banner by calling me "The glint on the edge of Solomon's Sword." That refers to something I wrote a long time ago, which I don't have a link for, but if you've got Lexis, search the law review file for his name and mine.

Daniel Solove did a nice bloggerly job of condensing everyone's talk into a one-liner.

Howard Bashman has this to say:

At a conference chock-full of law professor bloggers, you might expect that among the presenters the ratio of law geeks to non-law geeks would be quite high. In that respect, I found it interesting to observe first-hand that the coolness (or lack of coolness) of a given law professor's blog did not reliably indicate the coolness (or lack of coolness) of the blog's author. Not surprisingly, however, with Ann she was every bit as cool as her blog....

I wonder who the sentence before the sentence about me refers to. Who's the uncool lawprof with the cool blog and who's the cool lawprof with the uncool blog?

Timothy Armstrong sure took detailed notes. Thanks for reminding me of what I said. I was sort of wondering!

Roger Alford has a list of predictions for the future of law professors, e.g., "Law professors currently target their scholarship to appeal to student editors at major law journals (while also targeting their peers). In future decades, law professors will target their peers directly without intermediaries." Yeah, "disintermediation" -- I learned that word from Larry Solum.

But enough about the Bloggership conference. It's Monday, I'm back in Madison, and it's time to reengage with life here. Oddly, I've got to give a presentation about blogging today, at the "Socio-Legal Studies BrownBag." My colleague Gordon Smith, who was at the conference, is co-presenting, so it might feel a lot like the conference, but I'm thinking it won't be. A different crowd attends a "Socio-Legal Studies BrownBag" in Madison, Wisconsin then attends a conference on blogging and legal scholarship at Harvard. Expect me to reflect on the differences later today. And I've got to attend a Faculty Senate meeting today too. (I'm the Law School's alternate senator.) But what I really need to do is write some exams.

Digression prompted by the word "BrownBag": At the hotel the other day, I was watching some old "Monty Python" episode, and there was a sketch in which Graham Chapman played a man who would put a bag on his head whenever anyone said "mattress." It was typical Python nonsense, but Chapman had a way of putting the bag on his head that was far funnier than anything anyone else did. It was rather mysterious, that comic genius. How amusingly could you put a paper bag on your head? But I will not be putting a bag on my head at the "Socio-Legal Studies BrownBag," even though "Socio-Legal Studies BrownBag" sounds so serioso it makes me want to put a bag on my head.

Audible Althouse #47.

I'm feeling at cross-purposes with the other lawprofs at the lawproffy "Bloggership" conference at Harvard, and I'm thinking about Neil Young and what he meant to me when I was young. I'm home from Boston, sitting in my big room, and there are big birds flying across the sky. It's a very podcasty podcast that touches on the blogginess of blogging.

Here's the podcast. Live stream here.

Catching up on the NYT/taking a hot bath.

I want to read the three newspapers that came while I was away, but I don't want to spend all evening on the task. I've got a podcast to record, and "The Sopranos" and "Big Love" are on tonight. I'm also freezing on this damp, blustery day, in which I had to run around in the wind and rain twice -- once to get to an airplane. The solution is to run a hot bath and page through all the newspapers in the 15 minutes it takes to fill the tub. I'll speed-choose pieces to blog and set them aside to blog once I've soaked myself back to a normal temperature.

***

1. "Neil Young Is Angry About War and Wants Everyone to Know It" (on line title: "Neil Young's 'Living With War' Shows He Doesn't Like It") by Jon Pareles:

The songs on "Living With War" are straightforward and single-minded, setting aside the allusive, enigmatic quality of Mr. Young's rock classics. "These are all ideas we've heard before," he said. "There's nothing new in there. I just connected the dots."...

"We are the silent majority now, and we haven't done a damn thing," Mr. Young said. "We've stood by and watched this happen. But there's more of us than there is of them, and we have to do something. When people start talking and see they can get away with it, it's going to happen everywhere. It's going to be a landslide, it's going to be a tidal wave. This is just the tip of it."

The tip of the landslide... the tip of the tidal wave... damn... if only I could think of another metaphor...

Those "allusive, enigmatic" lyrics of long ago are far out of reach.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars/Yellow moon on the rise/Big birds flying across the sky/Throwing shadows on our eyes....

Oh, Neil... There are politics and there is art. I'll always love the Neil Young of the distant past.

The chains are locked and tied across the door/Baby, sing with me somehow...

2. "New York City as Film Set: From Mean Streets to Clean Streets," by John Clark:

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, said: "There's been a sea change. I can remember well into the 70's films where there is the terrific sense of New York as being this adventurous place. Certainly if you go back to the 30's and think of a film like 'My Man Godfrey,' New York is a great, dangerous playground. Those films really had a sense of how jazzy and exciting it was to be in New York. I can't think of the last film I've seen that had that feeling."

Paul Mazursky, the Brooklyn-born director of New York films like "Next Stop, Greenwich Village" (1976) and "An Unmarried Woman" (1978), echoed this view: "I'm trying to think of the last good New York movie." (He's still thinking.)

How ironic that the gentrifiers make the city too beautiful to serve as the backdrop for the art they love, when they love art because it is beautiful.

He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Beneath his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be...

3. "An Adjective for Cakes, but Not for Bill Gates," by Geoffrey Nunberg. I want to blog about this based on the title alone, and I have no idea what the article is about. Oh, it's about the word "rich." Ha, ha:

Asked in 2003 if he felt rich, Bill Gates would say only, "At this point I'm clearly not by some definition middle class."

Unlike "prosperous" or "affluent," "rich" implies a society divided into separate estates, a legacy of the word's origin in the Indo-European name for a tribal king.

People may disagree on exactly how much money it takes to be rich, but that only confirms that it's an absolute threshold, and that those who have crossed it are delivered from the cares that afflict the rest of us. (Nobody who wins the lottery cries "I'm affluent!")

One of my sons, when he was little, used to often ask me, "Are we rich?" There's a feeling we have about what it would be like to be rich. And it always seems as though we'd have to make at least twice as much as we do to have that feeling. Later, if you make that much money, you'll think you need twice that to feel rich. But if you look at yourself from the perspective of the vast majority of people in the world, shouldn't you be ashamed to say you're not rich? So how do you answer the child who asks "Are we rich?"

4. "Films of Infamy," by David Thomson.

... I can imagine a film other than "Munich" or "United 93," a greater film, a film about different kinds of courage. In this film, the courage of the passengers would be shown and honored, but there would be an equal effort to show the courage of the terrorists (without calling them simply "evil" or "insane")....

The really difficult film to make or offer in America will be the one that says no, the world did not alter its nature on 9/11, even if the worst politicians used that event to switch their reality. But on 9/11, we faced the first need to ask ourselves how other people — evil, alien, insane — could be so brave. The history of terrorism — and it includes the independence of this country — is that in the end you have to understand the grievance of the aggrieved, whether you agree with it or not. That film has still to come.

Well, films have shown the perspective of criminals and villains quite often. These characters, if the film is any good, have their motivations, grievances, and, of course, they are bold and daring enough to carry out their evil actions. But how can you think anyone should make such a movie about the enemy before the war is over? Filmmakers aren't cowards for declining to make a show of their own courage like that.

5. "Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York," Nikolai Ouroussoff.

The threats facing the contemporary city are not what they were when she first formed her ideas, now nearly 50 years ago. The activists of Ms. Jacobs's generation may have saved SoHo from Mr. Moses' bulldozers, but they could not stop it from becoming an open-air mall.

The old buildings are still there, the streets are once again paved in cobblestone, but the rich mix of manufacturers, artists and gallery owners has been replaced by homogenous crowds of lemming-like shoppers. Nothing is produced there any more. It is a corner of the city that is nearly as soulless, in its way, as the superblocks that Ms. Jacobs so reviled....

The lesson we should take from Ms. Jacobs was her ability to look at the city with her eyes wide open, without rigid prejudices. Maybe we should see where that lesson leads next.

Jacobs as a method, not a conclusion. Subtly and modestly stated.

***

Now it's time to do a podcast and then settle in for a strong dose of television. I have not watched enough TV in the last four days. It's time.

Home! Home! Madison! Home!

That's how I feel about home!

Composed en route from Boston:

Why, oh, why does it cost $7.95 to access the WiFi in an airport? What good is a "day pass" when I'm only here for an hour? In fact, when your security check-in is as abysmal as what I just went through at Logan Airport, here in Boston, you ought to make up for it by giving us free WiFi, or at least cutting the rate way down. If the check-in had gone as fast as it does at my home airport in Madison, I might have been willing to pay perhaps $5 for the time I would have had to fool around with the internet, but I spent half an hour in line. No $7.95 for you.

So here I am, composing my post in advance. By cutting me off from my beloved internet, you are causing me to write more about how I can't stand your airport. Give me free WiFi or I will bitch about your crappy airport on my somewhat popular blog.

What was so bad about the security check-in? The line was long. There were two lines on an incline in a hot corridor, and then one of the lines branched into two lines, which means it goes twice as fast, and at least I lucked into the faster line. At the front, where you lay out your carry-on items, instead of long, banked stainless steel channels, there are pushed-together plastic folding tables of the sort that a caterer might hide under tablecloths at a big outdoor banquet. My line snakes behind the monitors displaying the contents of bags belonging to people in the line we branched off from. Everyone in my line blithely invades the privacy of those other passengers by staring. What else is there to look at?

Well, there's that green-and-white Starbucks logo beyond the security checkpoint. In the dreary hell of the security line, you're concentrating your hopes on getting to the end. And there is that shining logo, the light at the end of the tunnel.

I'll have a large latte.

I didn't think of saying "venti latte." I never do. But if I had, I would have said it, because by then I was in love with Starbucks.

Continuing this post draft in Milwaukee: The WiFi here is $9.95. My flight boards in 10 minutes. Do I love the internet enough to pay $1 a minute? Apparently not.

Decompressing in Boston.

I spent yesterday wandering around Boston, going visual after the long day of words that was Friday.



Any conference is a mix of tension and boredom, ideas and clichés, interacting with other people and being alone inside your head. The "Bloggership" conference was an especially strange mix for me. On the one hand, I am surely and very securely a blogger and a law professor. These are two indisputable facts about me.

(Yesterday, I was minding my own business, walking down Newbury Street, and a homeless man hissed "stinking white bitch" at me and got some facts right.)



On the other hand, I feel that I have little in common with the other lawprof bloggers. Walking around Boston yesterday -- dodging epithets -- I was wondering if I was not entirely at cross-purposes with everyone else. At times, I exhorted them to blog like me, but I also always knew that they don't want to blog like me. Why should they? So much of their discussion was about how to get credit for blogging within their institutions and how to promote their professional standing through blogging, that is, how to exploit blogging in service of traditional law professor interests. They remind me of the journalists who mean to harness blogging to preserve and further the interests of mainstream media.

Where are my soulmates, the people who put blogging first? Are you not in love with blogging for blogging's sake, looking to see where blogging might lead you?



Decompressed, I've got to go now and find my way back home.

Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Did you watch Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner? I love Colbert, but it was a little scary watching him do his "Colbert Report" character outside of his brilliantly comical studio set that frames him as a ridiculous right-wing blowhard. We love the humor in context, but when the targets of the humor are there in the room with him, we can't dissolve into hilarity. We're completely distracted by thinking about how the live audience is reacting and whether Steve the actor has the -- well, as Stephen Colbert would say -- balls to stay in character, to stay pompous and righteous when he knows he's sticking it to the people Steve the comedian would normally depend upon to buoy him up with laughter.

Colbert could have tried to go on as a decent guy being a nice guest and supplying some perfectly pitched stand-up humor, the way Drew Carey has done in the past. But Colbert really isn't a stand-up comedian, and his humor is always set inside a character who is not him. He's an actor, and how hard, how monumentally awkward, it must have been to stay inside his character with such intimidating people around him. Wouldn't the sheer instinct for self-protection make him want to twinkle and say I kid but I love?

Wasn't it awful to perform without laughs? Maybe he should have filed the edges off a couple of jokes, but, basically, he did what he had to do to maintain his credibility with his real audience, those who watch "The Colbert Report." And we'll remember the horrible laughlessness of that night and marvel at the steely nerve of Stephen Colbert.