Brian Leiter deserves special recognition for digging out and reproducing on his site this wonderful parody of Strauss from the comments section of a recent Crooked Timber post.

Note to Leo Strauss: Get a blog!

Tyler Cowen notes that the MacArthur Genius Grants are out (half a million dollars, no strings attached), and like him, I don't know most of the people on the list. But, just out of curiosity I thought I'd look at the full list.

Poetry, I'm delighted to see, has gone to my current obsession-- Brad Leithauser, and also to nine other poets I've read at least a little of (including Robert Penn Warren) that's 10/34.

I'm a lot less well-versed in the fiction writers-- I know only Tom Pynchon and Ernest Gaines, and a nurse a high-school-fueled hatred for the latter. (Odd to me that Penn Warren gets the prize for poetry but not for fiction, but I guess that no other RPW novel stands up to All The King's Men, while his poetry's quality is more uniform, if slightly lower).

I'm just about as ignorant of the music winners. the two I know well are Ornette Coleman (who is to music what Gaines is to literature) and Max Roach (who always struck me as a sort of unexciting but high-quality drummer; I wonder what he did to warrant the prize).

The rest of the list is just darn bizarre-- like a funhouse mirror's reflection of greatness (though there are some truly deserving folk in there). I won't make my specific opinions too explicit, but isn't there something odd about a list that contains Harold Bloom, Richard Rorty, Anthony Amsterdam, Stanley Crouch, Susan Sontag, Stephen Wolfram, Stephen Jay Gould, Barbara McClintock, Matthew Rabin, and Danielle Allen, but not Richard Feynman, Amartya Sen, Richard Thaler, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Jurgen Habermas, Richard Posner?

Yes, of course these sorts of lists have to leave a lot of people out, so you can always come up with deserving folk who really ought to have been tapped, and yes of course the MacArthur foundation practically relishes its unfathomable selection criteria, and yes, the foundation gives high marks to future promise, but still, couldn't a few grants a year have been spared for some of the hard-hitters in these fields who stay(ed) productive until their last years?

I was just sent this story by Jim Leitzel, and after reading it, I can't help but post it:

Man Wants to Question Parrot in Court
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- A man claims a woman wrongly adopted his lost parrot -- and he can prove it if given a chance to question the bird in court.
Loulou, an 11-year-old African gray parrot, flew out of David DeGroff's apartment on April 12 after a guest who wasn't wearing her glasses accidentally walked into the screen door leading to the balcony.
On May 11, Nina Weaver, of Newburg, Pa., adopted an African gray from the D.C. Animal Shelter. DeGroff, convinced the bird is Loulou, filed a lawsuit seeking an opportunity to depose the parrot. He is seeking $15,000 for pain and suffering if the bird turns out to be Loulou.
According to DeGroff, Loulou's vocal repertoire includes whistling the theme song to ``The Andy Griffith Show'' and saying the phrase ``Daddy's gotta go to work.''
Immediately after Loulou left, DeGroff said, he started calling every animal agency in the area, including the D.C. Animal Shelter.
DeGroff said he again called the shelter in mid-May. A receptionist told him that an African gray had recently been adopted. DeGroff used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the adoption records.
DeGroff said he drove to Weaver's home, but no one answered when he knocked on the front door. He said he saw a bird through the window and felt a connection.
``She seemed like she tried to communicate with me,'' DeGroff said.
DeGroff was unable to determine if it could whistle the ``Andy Griffith'' tune. Frustrated, he returned home.
Weaver declined to speak with a Washington Post reporter who visited her house. ``We have no comment,'' she said. ``We're not going to fight this in the paper.''

Speaking of hypothetical situations, this Maureen Dowd column brought to mind an interesting possible scenario about the recall. Suppose that Gray Davis gets recalled by a 70% margin or so, and then suppose Arnold Schwarzenegger wins, with a 35% share of the vote. Could Davis supporters recall Governor S. and replace him with Governor Bustamante? (Arnold would be forbidden to run in his own post-recall election). Of course, then Arnold supporters could turn around and recall Bustamante, and so on. Wouldn't that be fun? [This would require some odd preferences among the electorate, but not inconceivable ones. In particular, it would require some odd behavior from McClintock voters, who would have to vote to sack Arnold even though he's probably better for them than Bustamante is. They could do this out of spite, out of a hope to change Arnold's position, or possibly out of a belief that McClintock stood a chance against Bustamante in an Arnold-free election. Given the behavior of Nader voters, it's not inconceivable.]

The scenario could really get quite silly-- like a mockery of a parliamentary system with its votes of no-confidence and no stable equilibrium to acheive. Of course, I don't mean this to make fun of the recall process; I happen to think it's a splendid idea, in general. I just think the combination of recall and first-past-the-post election, with the fact that the recalled governor can't himself run, lead to some pretty silly possibilities.

And a note to California readers: please vote for anybody but Bustamante.

Does Soldier Field look "rather good" or "like a Roman toilet"?

The answer, as all seem to ultimately agree, is that from the inside or above it's probably perfectly nice, but from the outside . . . well, it looks like space aliens have landed their mother ship and invaded the field (which might do wonders for the Bears chances of winning a game, but really ruins the Soldier Field aesthetics). I'm reminded of a saying I heard years ago visiting Warsaw, that the best view was from the big tower in the the middle of town, because it was the only place in Warsaw where you couldn't see the big tower.

Committed foes of Soldier Field should also dig up this May 5 piece by Richard Epstein in the Chicago Tribune (whose archives are sadly not free online). But I'll quote the opening:

Mayor Richard Daley's efforts to strong-arm the reconstruction of Soldier Field for the Chicago Bears received an undeserved shot in the arm when Cook County Circuit Judge John K. Madden flatly rebuffed the efforts of the Illinois Landmark Preservation Council and the Friends of the Park to stop the deal.
To many, the lawsuit might look like the never-ending battle between pro and anti-development forces. But the truth lies elsewhere. As a vocal defender of property rights, I (in the interests of full disclosure) have worked as the pro bono legal adviser to both preservation groups. Why these strange bedfellows?
Quite simply because the miserable financials of the Soldier Field deal tarnish it forever for any believer in limited government and private property. Usually, a defense of property rights starts with the takings clause of the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and its analogous state provisions. These clauses allow our government to take property for public use upon payment of just compensation. That doctrine is complemented by the public trust doctrine, which places limitations on the disposition of public lands. Its best articulation provides: "nor shall public property be granted for private use, without just compensation."
Public assets, such as prime lakefront real estate, should not be given away for a song to private interests, any more than corporate assets should be transferred to the firm's president at bargain rates. No one individual or group should be allowed to run off with the lion's share of the profits from public activities, and governments at all levels should be discouraged from moving assets from higher- to lower-value uses....

Well, it's not another U of C Nobel, but worth noting that today's medicine award also went to an Illinois scholar-- Paul Lauterbur of Urbana (he'll share the prize with Nottingham's Sir Peter Mansfield.)

A riddle for the intellectual property buffs:

Does it make sense to allow a tea-manufacturer to protect the use of an author's name to support the sale of a product that's not actually that related to the author? At issue are the Jane Austen teas (discussed extensively by Austentatious). Now, as I understand it the legal issue here is relatively simple-- you can trademark the name of your product regardless of how sensible your product is. It doesn't matter whether Austen drank tea or whether your beer really is "maltifresh;" (false advertising not withstanding).

But this brings to mind a curious hypothetical problem, not at issue here. What if Austen were still alive and her works were still in copyright? Then wouldn't she have some right to keep her likeness from being used to advertise a product she didn't believe in? I'm not sure. My mind is fluttering with some law review article by Justice Brandeis, the idea of Jane Austen as a public figure, and the limitations of trademark law in both directions. Can Jane Austen trademark her name? If not, can somebody else trademark her name?

But suppose (which might not be the case) that there's some point at which Jane Austen is alive and well enough that she can stop Ms. Lund from slandering her name on a bunch of tea. At what point does that right to protect one's good name die? With Austen's death? With the expiration on the copyright of her work? Ever?

Sorry to fill a post with so many more questions than answers, but such are the limits of my education.

In just a random bit of catch-up reading, I thought I'd plug this Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick on the Do-Not-Call Registry. I thought at first I was going to be writing a scathing fisking of her piece (which starts by discussing the balance between the First Amendment right to speak against the Nth Amendment right to be left alone in one's home). But in fact, I agree with not just the law but also the presentation of the article, which might be because she devotes most of her time to shooting down arguments rather than building them up. It's a lot easier to do the former, but that's all right because it's often a lot more valuable too.

[One issue to flag for disagreement. Ms. Lithwick offhandedly lobs a shot at the Supreme Court's decision to uphold high school vouchers as constitutional:

It's simply not enough to say that individuals have privately chosen to sign up for the government registry—that's the sleight-of-hand the court has used to uphold school vouchers.

Well, the first of my computer woes is solved-- I now have a functioning computer password, so I can use the real computers in the New Court Computer Lab rather than the crappy old things in the Internet Cafe. For reasons opaque to me, I have to wait three days before the internet connection in my room is approved . . . (exhibit number 741 in how Gun Control analogies don't apply sensibly to the internet).

What, you might ask, was wrong with my password? The answer's a little embarrassing but since blogging is exhibitionism (and since I'm still reading up before I can make a substantive post) I'll tell. The answer is that l+l does not equal 2. That is, what I mistook for numeral "one"s, were actually "el"s. Oops. The only consolation is that the local Trinity Computer Support folks couldn't figure that out either... I had to wander down to the New Museums Site to find a very helpful gent who sorted that out straightaway, but only on the condition that I sat around to listen to his pine tutorial (old-school U of C students will know that anybody from before the class of 2005 needs no help with pine).

This week's 20 Questions victim is Volokh blogger, Chicago professor, and confessed comic book geek Jacob Levy. Read on for his opinions on multiculturalism, academia, and the X-Men.

1. You’ve gone on record in the past as being proud of U Chicago for its relatively uncompromising view that students have no right to be protected from hurt feelings. To what extent is this belief about free speech and academic freedom contingent on certain background assumptions about American campuses? That is to say, in your book The Multiculturalism of Fear, you approach issues of cultural pluralism with the goal of minimizing political cruelty and humiliation rather than upholding certain intuitive rights. Would a U. Chicago-style policy be appropriate in all countries, or could one possibly point to places where, due to particularly vicious inter-group conflict, the need to avoid a deeply felt sense of public humiliation pointed in the direction of speech guidelines and the like?

This is an excellent question, and one that to some degree I struggle
with.

So—university speech codes, or limits on the intellectual freedom of students and faculty. Since Nigerian Muslims seem all too willing to be “provoked” into slaughtering thousands of Christians because someone publishes an insult to Mohammed, should the rector of a Nigerian university prohibit such insults? I think at least sometimes the answer has to be ‘yes.’ But now I’ll surround that with qualifiers. I don’t think it’s desirable for the university to ever be subject to greater limitations on speech and intellectual inquiry than are needed in the surrounding society. (That’s the university-as-such, not special-mission universities like religious ones or overtly ideological ones.) Universities ought to be the place where the envelope can be pushed at least a bit. And I distrust speech codes as what seems to be part of the permanent settlement in a society. If the paramilitary groups are ever successfully disarmed in Northern Ireland, if the province does acquire something like a just and stable peace, that peace should be based on liberal openness, not on consociational pluralist protection of the component groups. I think limitations on free inquiry ought to be viewed as something like emergency measures, and ought to be accompanied by restatements of the principle that, ultimately, the onus is on listeners and readers not to be provoked.

2. You’ve become a popular contributor to the lawyer-dominated Volokh
Conspiracy, and have taught classes on jurisprudence in the past, but your posts seem to have largely shied away from questions of legal theory. What are your own views on the question of legal formalism?

There are a couple of reasons for that relative silence. One is comparative advantage. I’m just not as interested in hearing myself talk about legal theory as I am in hearing Eugene, Randy, or Larry Solum do so. They’re far more knowledgeable about it than I am. I think I bring something different to the table. By contrast, I’m in a good position to bring legal theory to students—especially undergraduates, but now that Andrei Marmor has left Chicago I sometimes teach grad-level jurisprudence as well. (I should be better-equipped to do that, and less diffident about public commentary on legal theory, after my year as a Mellon Fellow at Chicago Law in 2004-05.)
The other is that, even within legal theory, my interests don’t quite run to judicial/ interpretive questions. The positivism-natural law debate is more interesting to me than the debate about formalism; I think it’s one of the weaknesses of certain American legal theorists that they try to reduce all questions of jurisprudence into questions of judicial behavior. (I emphatically don’t include any of the people named in the previous paragraph in that criticism.)

All of that said, I’ll give a short, enigmatic response. In my undergrad jurisprudence course I assigned Coke, Langdell, and Holmes on successive days. “The life of the law is[/has been]”: reason, logic, or experience, respectively. The formalism debate is largely conducted as a Langdell-Holmes debate; but my sympathies lie with Coke. There’s a difference betwen common-law reason and logic strictly understood, and that difference is enough that I don’t consider myself a formalist. But I’m more like a formalist than I am like most contemporary anti-formalists.

3. U. Chicago economist Robert Lucas once remarked that after one starts looking at the question of economic growth, its importance makes thinking about any other problem difficult. Do you think that political theorists take economic growth seriously enough—is there too much talk about cutting the pie, and not enough on growing it?

I’ve never seen that Lucas quote, but I like it a lot. I don’t know whether it was primarily about growth in poor countries, but I’ll assume that it was and proceed with my rant accordingly.

I very strongly think that most political theory and political philosophy about economic questions-- especially the literature on global distributive justice—needs to pay much more attention to growth and wealth-generation. The amount of ink spilled by philosophers about foreign aid budgets is vastly, disproportionately, higher than that spilled about, say, the rich-country protectionism that so badly damages poor countries’ ability to grow. I’ve heard that, at a major philosophy conference, there was a panel with Amartya Sen and a leading global justice theorist who I shan’t name. The theorist (according to the story I’ve heard) attacked Sen’s excellent book Development as Freedom for its attention to the rule of law, democracy, and microeconomic liberalization in poor countries, saying that was all a distraction from the real issues of global redistribution, and that Sen’s prominence meant that he had a special responsibility only to talk about such redistribution. I wasn’t there and can’t confirm (part of why I won’t name the other person). But the story is very plausible, and its plausibility is very telling.

Wealth is not the cause of poverty and poverty is not the cause of wealth; that’s a lesson that I think the global justice literature has had a terribly hard time internalizing. Sometimes there’s a causal link between the wealth of some and the poverty of others—but not automatically, and not usually. The wealthiest and the poorest societies in the world aren’t tied by bonds of exploitation; they’re not tied by any economic bonds at all, because the very poorest countries have vanishingly little trade, vanishingly little FDI.

I’m no economist. But I know enough economics, and enough comparative politics, to recognize decades-out-of-date assumptions when I see them. The resource curse is now one of the best-established results in development. But there are still theorists who treat the unequal distribution of stuff in the ground as the primary cause of inequality of wealth and income, people who think that povetry is caused by the not-having of oil and diamonds.

4. As you’ve reminded your fans recently, your status as an assistant professor means that your blogging has to take a back seat to tenurable activity. In some areas of academia and parts of the blogosphere, tenure itself has become the topic of heated debate. What are your own thoughts on tenure—is it still an important bulwark of academic freedom?

Yes.

But I do, absolutely, think that tenure makes a difference in the ability and willingness to speak freely, without fear or favor; and that that intellectual independence is a major strength of American academia. Knock on wood, I’m looking forward to it...

5. Brian Leiter has spoken on his weblog of political science departments being home to bad philosophy. You’ve spoken before at length on the distinctions between political theory and political philosophy. Do you think political theorists don’t get enough respect from political philosophers, or is there a healthy relationship between the two?

Oh, boy. I wrote that post pretty carefully, and I’m not sure how much I can say that is both new and judicious. But let’s try.

In general, the sense is that we’re engaged in a common enterprise in
slightly-different ways, but that that just offers more ability to learn
new things from one another in the common enterprise. At the meetings of
the American Society for
Political and Legal Philosophy, where theory/ poli sci papers are commented on by a lawyer and a philosopher, philosophy papers by a theorist and a lawyer, and law papers by a theorist and a philosopher, I’ve seen lots of disagreement, and it’s often been disagreement that takes the form “let me tell you something that we know in my discipline that you may not know in yours.” But it’s always extremely amicable and respectful and engaged, and I’ve never seen any panel break down into assertions of disciplinary superiority in the way that can often happen on interdisciplinary panels.

6. It’s fall again, and that means the start of another season of admissions. It seems safe to say that people are always looking for advice and guidance on the subject of graduate admissions. What would yours be to an aspiring political theorist?

On whether, or on how?

And, of course: read, write, present, and publish. That’s the career that you’re in training for; learn to love it, and learn to structure your time to allow yourself to do it.

7. On a related note, it seems like one of the most frustrating aspects of the applications process is the difficulty in getting good comparative data about programs—standardized measures of selectivity, placement, and the like. Is there a need for something like a Philosophical Gourmet Report in political science?

Hmm. There are lots of rankings of departments and of subfields. Sometimes it seems like the journal PS is 50% made up of arguments about the best methodologies for ranking departments. But of course they’re all research-based, not grad-teaching based, and Leiter has an argument as to why those two can’t be conflated.

I dunno. I got very good advice from my undergrad advisor, and I think I’m well-informed-enough to give good advice now. More information in the hands of grad applicants is a good thing, and if someone asked me to express judgments as part of the reputational-survey part of a Political Science Gourmet Report I would. But the need doesn’t seem urgent to me.

8. You’ve spoken of mandatory service programs as the bad idea that never dies, and called the support of them something of a litmus test for whether someone thinks of citizens as individuals or as the state’s property. Does your hostility extend to state-funded but still voluntary programs, such as AmeriCorps? What about high-schools and universities requiring volunteer service for graduation?

This is as good an opportunity as any for a confession. In 1991 or ‘92, before Clinton was elected and created Americorps but when something similar was under consideration, I made a public prediction. I predicted that any Americorps-like program would become mandatory within ten years of its creation. We’re not quite at Americorps’ tenth anniversary, but I was clearly wrong. It seemed to me that so many of the advocates really wanted compulsory national service that a voluntary arrangement would certainly prove short-term. In a way that was a result of taking intellectuals too seriously. Charlie Moskos may provide intellectual cover for the creation of Americorps, but that doesn’t mean his ideas actually determine its shape. I’d also been made nervous by too many Democratic Presidential candidates during too many NH Primary campaigns calling for compulsory service. The idea may never die, but it’s also not inevitable in the way I said it was a decade ago.

If private universities require service that’s different. I’d oppose it at secular research universities, but wouldn’t consider it a gross offense; and at some religious or ideological colleges it might well be appropriate.

9. Is it difficult to be both a libertarian and a political theorist deeply concerned with ameliorating persistent evils rather than utopian reforms? That is to say, can one be a libertarian when thinking about political situations where libertarian approaches just aren’t in the cards?

It doesn’t seem difficult to me, but I guess I view libertarianism as a source of information about the risks, dangers, and evils of political life, not as a program of utopian reform. I don’t do ideal theory, don’t even quite believe in it. I’m concerned with “better,” not “best.”

10. You spent your year as a Fulbright scholar in Australia, and you spend some time at Oxford as well. Do you think that more academics ought to spend some time outside their home country? You remark in The Multiculturalism of Fear that “Americans talking about multiculturalism in America seem to have the luxury of a certain lack of gravity,” pointing at how much more serious the issues cultural pluralism poses are in many other areas of the world; do you think American thought about this issue and others might be sharpened by exposure to other places?

Well, it really is pretty common for academics to spend time elsewhere— research trips, leaves, and so on. Maybe it seems more common to me than it really is because a) I’m in political science, which includes a fair number of people who must do research in other countries and b) I’m at an elite research university with funding for that sort of thing. But, from that paradoxically parochial perspective, it looks to me as if there’s no crisis of academic parochialism in terms of not travelling. (See David Lodge’s Small World for a very funny, if out-of-date, look at the globetrotting conference-goers’ life.)

Of course, one can have a thoroughly parochial perspective even while globetrotting, and I do think a great deal of that goes on. But that swipe at American multiculturalism arguments in the beginning of my book was more aimed at a certain set of public intellectuals, columnists and commentators, and to some degree ed school people than it was at American political philosophers or political theorists.

11. What place do you see curricula like Chicago’s “common core” having in an ideal system of liberal education? Should every college student be taking Classics of Social & Political Thought?

I’m a pluralist; I think that there are a number (though not an infinite number) of ways to organize an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. In particular I continue to have some real affection for Brown’s complete curricular freedom, while still believing tremendously in the Chicago core. What I think tends to work less well than either is distribution requirements. They generate the physics-for-poets problem. There are, because there have to be, de facto special courses whose purpose is just the filling of the distribution requirement, courses that waste professors’ and students’ time. The Chicago core, on the other hand, offers the same foundational education to those who are future professors of a subject as to those who will never look at it again. Classics of Social and Political Thought (or its peer sequences, such as Power, Identity, and Resistance) stand in place of any intro-to-poli-sci sequences for our concentrators, and so will not be dumbed down to cater to those who have no interest in politics or philosophy. This is to the benefit of that latter group as well; they take real courses in the subject, not silly time-fillers.

As to substance: I actually think it’s a shame that we can’t institutionally accommodate students taking multiple Core sequences in the same division. Taking CSPT and PIR—along with, say, Human Being and Citizen or Philosophical Perspectives, and a Civilization sequence—would offer one of the most impressive introductory undergraduate educations I can imagine. I’m a big fan of CSPT; I teach the Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau-Constant portion that I’m not on leave. But it’s not complete in itself, and I do hope that the students who take it have a chance to read more classics of social and economic theory (Smith, Durkheim, Weber, more Marx and Tocqueville than we cover in CSPT) sometimes.

This is kind of narrowcasting, but I’ll put in my plug anyways. I think it makes a big difference that our social sciences core sequences last all year. Under the revised curriculum, the civilization and humanities requirements have been cut to two quarters. I wasn’t at Chicago for that fight and have no view on it. But many of the sequences remain three terms long, with the third term being optional. I want to encourage Chicago undergrads to stick with both sequences all year long if they can; opt in to that third term. The Core is a tremendous asset, and it’s a great deal of why you chose to come here. Take full advantage of it.

12. Intellectual property has become a hot topic of late—certainly one that generates a lot of worthwhile commentary in the blogosphere. But IP is also a burning issue for many concerned with indigenous peoples and developing nations, most obviously in connection with bioprospecting and pharmaceuticals. In TMOF, arguing for alienability of land and a common law process for doing so, you speak about the necessity of having some formalized system to mediate disputes between parties for whom there is no shared understanding about use and meaning. Do you take a similar position with regards to indigenous genetic material, or the local knowledge of rainforest communities about the properties of plants?

Oy. As if I didn’t already know which Crescat Conspirator many of these questions were from, I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this came from the one who took the class on indigenous intellectual property last year...

Mix all that in with bioethics—about which I’m similarly at sea—and
the result is that I’m just not prepared to say. I’m pretty initially
skeptical of the idea that ethnic groups have property rights in their
members’ genetic material. Despite all my support for indigenous property
rights and self-government, my instincts here lie with Richard
Shweder in his review of Who Owns Native Culture? But I’m just not familiar enough with the arguments on the other side to say anything more.

13. Rational choice methodology is something of a hot topic in political science today. Supporters of the Perestroika movement see rational choice theorists as imperialists who want to take all the politics out of political science, while others, like David Laitin of Stanford, see the methodological aspirations of rational choice as crucial in accumulating real knowledge within the discipline. Where do you think political theory falls in all this—do theorists have something to learn from rational choice, or should they read more Montesquieu and leave the math to others?

I’m firmly, and happily, of the view that political theory is orthogonal to the dispute between the perestroikans and their opponents. That dispute is, at its core, about how to do good empirical research that successfully explians the phenomena it analyzes. That’s an important question. It’s not our question, at least not in a general way. Many theorists have lined up with the perestroikans, out of a general sense or fear that the dominance of formal and quantitative methods is bad for us as part of the discipline, that our sometimes-tenuous status within this social science discipline is made more tenuous the more scientific the discipline aspires to become. And, undoubtedly, there are qualitative and interpretive empirical people whose work is close to a kind of political theory, and critical and interpretive theorists whose work is close to some of the perestroikans’ empirical work. But there are also normative theorists who draw on the tools of game theory, formal decision-theoretic models, and so on. Many of these are utilitarians, but by no means all. A Theory of Justice has a great deal more formal modelling in it than it has interpretive empirical work on particular societies!

To be much more concrete, on one of the questions that divides perestroikans and their opponents: it will often, even usually, be a better use of a marginal year of coursetime for a theorist to learn or improve a language than to take a second full year of formal methods.

14. What were the most important influences on your decision to pursue a career in academia, and what do you think you’d be doing if you had to choose an alternate path?

In college I knew that academia was my most likely career path, and my friends from college say it was always entirely clear to them that that’s what I would do. Lots of people now say that they can’t imagine me doing anything else, and it certainly tempermentally suits me. But I wasn’t sure, then, and so I tried other things pretty actively, to see. The three big ones: op-ed columnist (an itch that is now scratched with blogging and TNR-column-writing), radio news, and running for office (NH State Rep, to be precise). Running decisively cured me of any interest in active electoral politics. I wasn’t ever really cured of the op-ed itch, which is why I blog. But I also came to believe, and still believe, that it’s not desirable to set out on a career path of “opinion journalism,” that one should come to it either from news-journalism after one has acquired some expertise (Thomas Friedman) or from academia or another intellectual profession in which one has learned how to think thoughs of longer than 800 words.

Oddly enough, it’s radio news that was the really active alternative. I might well have delayed grad school and given it a try professionally. In the actual event, I ended up in management rather than news for my final year at the station, and that was necessary but a lot less fun, and interrupted my ability to build up the news credentials that would have been necessary.

15. In your introduction to The Multiculturalism of Fear, you talk about the difficulties America has in facing up to its race problem. Do you see much hope, here?

Some, but not much. It’s hard for me even to be sure what much hope would look like—which of course isn’t an excuse for despair or indifference. In that section I talk about two cases: American Indians and the black-white divide. With respect to the first I do have a strong sense of what justice would look like, and I’m perfectly confident that we’re not going to see it. With respect to the second... blacks and whites in America are members of a single, wretchedly dysfunctional, family that can’t and shouldn’t be broken up, a family with accumulated resentment, guilt, annoyance, misunderstanding-plus-understanding-all-too-well, injustice, overcompensation, and so on. In important institutional respects things are better than anyone could possibly have reasonably predicted fifty years ago. But in important political, economic, social, and cultural respects, things are vastly worse than anyone would have predicted given the change in institutions. I do think that if the economics improved, much else would follow; but the wealth gap means it’s hard to see how the economics could possibly improve enough.

But there probably couldn’t have been anything else. I wrote my first big undergraduate research paper second semester junior year on the Kymlicka-Kukathas debate and Wisconsin v. Yoder, then realized I wanted to write a senior thesis about issues that grew out of the paper, then realized I wanted to go to Australia to follow up on questions that grew out of the thesis, then... It’s not too hard to draw a direct path from that paper to most of what I still write on; I was seized by a set of problems and they still haven’t let go of me. Nor do I expect them ever to do so.

16. Some of your recent work has been on the tensions between advocates of centralized rationalization and celebrators of local diversity within the liberal tradition. How would you say that understanding the historical nature of the divide helps us come to grips with the issue today?

Three ways, and each requires a different kind of historical research. (NB: I don’t think any of this is limited to my own project. I think it’s very often true, which is why political theorists try to integrate the study of the history of political thought with explorations of concepts and normative questions.)

Third, there’s the task of making the familiar unfamiliar, to get a fresh look at a topic. In my first book I mostly did this by not treating American cases until I had already worked out an argument and a view about analogous non-U.S. cases. That was an attempt not to just rationalize my initial homegrown policy views. And it worked in at least one instance; my argument in favor of an official apology for slavery, in the last chapter, was not my starting position. Now I’m moving in time as well as in space, and succesfully winding quite a lot to unsettle my initial assumptions.

17. What are your primary sources for news, and do you think citizens ought to be more informed than they generally are?

First question first. I effectively never watch or listen to any broadcast news (even though I used to be in radio news, back in college). I find it too frustrating that I can’t control story selection, and that everything manages to be simultaneously so short in content and so damn’ slow. By the time I watch a half-hour of CNN, I could’ve gotten through the NYT front-page section and made a start on the business section.

Electronically:
The line between newsgathering and opiniongathering is of course a blurry one with blogs, so I’ll just describe my basic electronic habits. Washington Post online, everyday. Boston Globe and Manchester Union Leader, periodically check the headlines. (Ditto cnn.com .) Globe sports pages, every day during baseball season. The Australian, the Times of India, Le Monde, most days. Assorted other newspapers irregularly (Times of London, Jerusalem Post, Sydney Morning Herald)-- plus, of course, following links from blogs to specific newspaper articles. aldaily, every day. Then blogs: Crooked Timber, Volokh, Oxblog, Drezner, Drum, Yglesias, Solum, and Crescat are the ones I’m most likely to check lots of times in a day. Postrel, Kleiman, Hit & Run, Corner, &c, deLong, Instapundit, Easterbrook at least once a day. Used to check Julian Sanchez all the time, but less often now that he posts less often to his own blog.

18. What, besides read comic books and science-fiction, does Jacob T. Levy do for fun?

At least until Quicksilver came out, SF actually made up a steadily declining share of my fiction reading. (Now, of course, Quicksilver is all my fiction reading.) So: reading fiction, pretty broadly. Book-buying is also a major source of entertainment for me; I can spend endless hours in bookstores.

And blogging, which is a hobby, and so has to count as something I do for fun.

19. For an absolutely necessary follow-up, if Jacob T. Levy were an X-Man, which X-Man would he be, and why?

(Geekery ahead; be warned of possible unseriousness.)
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I ‘ve always been more DC- than Marvel-oriented. My high school went in for Halloween in a big way, and the year that three of my friends dressed as Colossus, Cyclops, and Wolverine (complete with inordinately-impressive handmade spring-loaded claws) I dressed as a moderately obscure DC character instead.

And besides, part of the point of the X-Men is that one doesn’t particularly want to be one of them. The only ones who are really well-adjusted are Beast, Nightcrawler, and Shadowcat, two of whom have the disadvantage of being blue and furry and one of whom spent years trapped in her ghost form.
I’d want Cypher’s power, but wouldn’t want to be Cypher, as he’s dead. Personality-wise I’m most like Beast, I guess. I’d love it if I reminded people of Longshot, but that’s probably never going to happen.

20. And for a closely connected follow-up, if you were banished to a desert island and could only bring five books with you, which would they be?

What a dreadful thought.

Well, regardless of geeky how this makes me sound, one clearly has to be one of these new one-volume collections of the Lord of the Rings. There’s just nothing else I’ve reread and reread so many times, and remain confident that I would continue to reread and reread for decades without getting bored.