I was talking recently to a family friend, a professional editor, about the essay section on the new SAT's. She suggested a reason for it that had not occurred to me: It gives the colleges an example of the student's writing that is guaranteed not to have been written by their parents. Granted, it hadn't ever occurred to me to have my parents write my college application essays. They and I both knew that I stood a better chance of getting in if I wrote them myself. Nor did the editor touch her daughter's essays. My friend was probably the best writer in our high school, and would not let her mother even read her essays. She attended that other Chicago school on her own merit.

College applications are in my mind at the moment because my younger (can't say little; when it comes to headlocks, she's got the advantage of height) sister is a junior in high school. Her guidance counselor will be retiring at the end of the month, and so she's sent the students home with forms for the parents to fill out about their children. The answers will inspire her replacement when asked to write counselor's recommendations about these students she's barely met. (Crib sheets?) Anecdotal evidence suggests that some parents don't really understand this assignment, and are supplying the counselor with a list of AP scores in the section that asks for stories about the student's strengths. There's probably 10 adjectives that colleges want to hear, and 9.5 of them can be said to apply to any good kid. It's how you tell the story behind them that counts. My savvy parents called me in after the first draft. (They've also banned me from writing that my dearly beloved sister, the universally acknowledged brains of the family, has a certain ineffable je ne sais quoi about her. Killjoys. Just kidding, if ya'll are reading.)

Now that I've started working on this essay, I feel personally invested in getting her into the college of her dreams. She's getting an excellent recommendation from her parents, via their ghostwriter, with hopes that it will help. Truthfully, I believe she'd get in on her own merits even if the counselor just wrote the generic "She's a great student and a great person," and no editing hand other than spellcheck ever touched her essays (what a wit. I save the few things she writes to me, and can probably count them on one hand, but she's got the deadpan of a David Sedaris). While I'll go full-out on the parents' rec, I will hold back on her application essays. It's not just a sense of fair play---not with her dreams at stake, and with some of the other students getting help from tutors and parents---but a belief that colleges can tell the difference between essays written by the applicant and those driven by the family. I'll trust her brains and style to carry her through, and try to trust the colleges to ferret out essays severely marked up by older hands.

Let me add what I hope will be a helpful note to Raffi's torture post below. The term "torture" seems to encompass-- through more and less precise definitions-- two rather different things.

1, There is the historical definition of torture as the use of physical coercion to extract confessions from those who are believed to be guilty of a crime but cannot yet be convicted of it for procedural reasons. Professor John Langbein thinks that this narrow, nasty, historical practice should get exclusive use of the word. In any case, there is generally connected to this the concept of torture as the use of physical coercion to extract information or confessions from people, generally people who have not been given full judicial process and found guilty of crimes. Call this torture as interrogation.

2, There is also the more modern notion of torture as some set of really nasty, cruel and unusual ways of inflicting emotional or physical pain or harm or damage. This sounds in our own constitutional tradition forbidding "cruel and unusual" punishments, and the exact boundaries of this are rather hard to pin down. But for most people it is bad almost by definition-- that is, "torture" seems to be a name people give to punishments that they think are very horrendous and ought not to be imposed. Call this torture as punishment.

Now, I hope it is obvious that these can be (and are) very different things. There is naturally quite a bit of overlap, since many of the practices that were traditionally used to coerce confessions out of people were so nasty and brutish that we would balk at doing them today even to convicted and nasty criminals. I'm not sure yet if I wish to take the Langbeinian position that the word "torture" should only be used to describe torture as interrogation and never to describe torture as punishment.

But even so, I don't think it's possible to productively discuss the pros and cons of torture without discussing the different moral problems: in the first case, what amount of process ought to be required before we can use physical force against arguably innocent people for what we believe to be the greater good, and in the second case, what practices ought to be ought of bounds no matter how much process or how culpable the victim.

UPDATE: In retrospect I may have miscounted-- it seems like there are really not two but three relevant types of torture. The first is the historical "torture", the use of physical pain to convince technically innocent people to fess up. The second is the interrogative instrumental "torture", where force is used against perhaps-innocents to get them to reveal information for the sake of the greater good. The third is the punitive "torture" where bizarre or cruel things are done out of whatever motivation for punishment. If these things are wrong it is presumably because, respectively, 1, they destroy the integrity of judicial process, 2, they violate Kantian or Nozickian principles against using people up for the greater good, or 3, they are nasty and uncivilized.

I read Joseph Lelyveld's article on torture in this week's New York Times Magazine with real interest. Not only is the topic important, but I (along with Mitch) constituted the right of center contingent in Professor Levinson's Torture seminar here at HLS, mentioned in the article. Mr. Lelyveld visited the class twice (I think) while writing the piece.

It's a good article. But fundamentally, I think all the debate thus far has missed the foundational problem - why, precisely, is torture thought to be so intrinsically vile, so horrible that it alone attracts the non-waivable censure of what claims to be international law?

I make no claim that torture is ever good - I was as disgusted by Abu Ghraib as the next person. But if indeed we feel it necessary in some cases to drop nuclear weapons on people (and I would not hesitate to do so, if the circumstances warranted - as they would have in the cold war, and did at the end of WWII) and if indeed carpet bombing in the worsts of wars is justified (and as I said in class, to the apparent consternation of all but Mitch, I would have ordered the bombing of Dresden) then why is torturing one person for potentially vital information so especially inhuman?

There are some plausible reasons why torture itself might be worse than these other outrages. Perhaps, we might say, having someone entirely in your power is what drives torture beyond the Pale - just as evil as dropping a nuclear bomb on a surrendered power with no air force might be. Maybe. Or, perhaps, torture is especially evil because it creates torturers, while the other brutal acts I discuss above separate the perpetrator from the consequences of his acts. Also possible.

But at the moment, no one has come up with a fully explicated answer. The evil of torture, as an evil beyond all other evils, is assumed - and debate centered about how to stop it, or how to regulate its use when necessary. But we won't be able to credibly commit to stopping torture, I think, unless lawyers have a serious argument about why precisely these acts are so dangerous, so outside the normal realm of martial activity. Until we have that argument, I fear that denounciations of torture simply won't have the strong foundation they need to survive calls of necessity or vengeance. And if our most civilized minds can't discern a distinction between torture and the worst exigencies of war, then maybe there isn't one.

Will rightly exorciates Harvard's commencement food below. It was quite bad, though some of the sweets were ok. I also agree with his hypothesis that serving many people lunch is a lot harder than serving many people cakes.

My own experience strengthens that hypothesis. I spent one summer during college working in the wedding industry. Aside from learning that the industry appears to be made up of rapacious hooligans (no, there is no circumstance in which a wedding should cost $70,000) I discovered that wedding food is generally quite bad, and often very similar. This is despite the tremendous expense involved - the food only seemed to become enjoyably edible once you passed the $80 dollar per person threshold, and even then things were in the realm of hot plates and pasta salads. Driven by brides (alas. I never saw a groom who evidenced the slightest bit of enthusiasm for the reception and ceremony) desperate to outdo their friends, this atmosphere of poor value reigned supreme at almost every party I supervised, except one of those theme weddings run by a couple of SCA enthusiasts where the food consisted of mutton joints. And since I was generally fed that summer with the leftovers of a thousand parties, you can be safe in the knowledge that I'm not speaking out of ignorance. I ate some of almost everything available.

But people seem to like getting married, for reasons I haven't quite unearthed. So what is to be done? If left to me, I'd go in one of two directions. First, I might put a copious amount of meat on a grill, or even better, a cow or a few lambs over a spit. With a lot of beer, and some cakes and pies, I doubt you could have a much more enjoyable party anywhere. Or alternatively, I might invite only a few people, and take them for a real dinner at an unforgetable restaurant. Preferably in some other country. It wouldn't cost any more than serving 100 people $80 dollar meals each, and everyone involved would have a better time.

But in any case, what I certainly would not do is hire a catering company, and especially not Sodexho, the geniuses in charge year round here at Harvard. That, I think, would be a really bad way to start off a marriage.

The art of losing isn't hard to master. I managed to leave a beloved panama hat someplace on the train platform at Reagan airport yesterday. My girlfriend noticed this as the two of us were about to board the train, and we both looked around, distressed and confused, unable to find it, before concluding that it must have blown away. [C.f. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada 163 ("Torture, my poor love! Torture! Yes! But it's all sunk and dead.")]

As I despondently got on the 1/2 full train, a nice man abandoned his seat so that the two of us could sit together. (There were plenty of seats on the train, but all half-filled). As we discussed where and when one could obtain a replacement hat, he finally broke in to our conversation (just as the train clicked into Crystal City station) to ask whether we were talking about a lost white hat. We were, and he had seen it being picked up back at the station by a nice lady who was moving it to safekeeping. We jumped trains, went back, found it.

My hat is safe, sound, and in surprisingly good shape given its recent time being batted around an external metro stop (as well as being poked and prodded by persistent thorns at Patapsco park last month). I don't know the people responsible for saving it were, but thanks.

Phoebe questions the lack of lunch food at Chicago's commencement. Having suffered through the strange greasy grey chicken of two Harvard commencement lunches last week, I hypothesize that an edible lunch is much harder to serve to thousands of people than sweet and salty snacks. This is quite plausible for a host of culinary reasons (lack of large kitchen, ability of sugar and salt to act as preservatives so things can be made the night before, &c.). Better to just let everybody pack into Eduardo's, I think, and moan the loss of the awesome and inexpensive Cocorico.

More seasoned U of Cers than I can answer her other question (about where the tradition of generally selecting commencement speakers from the Chicago faculty comes from) but I can at least date it to the reign of Robert Hutchins (PDF).

For reasons unclear to me, the YLS powers-that-be reject a sensible system of choosing limited enrollment classes like, e.g., transferrable-voting. Instead, we have a flat-out system of preference-ranking. You rate your most desired classes, and are admitted on that basis, which encourages students to game and out-think the system by guessing which classes will be popular and which ones will be too easy to get in to to waste a bid on.

But this sort of strategery is frustrated even further when one lists one's first choice as, say, "Constitutional Litigation with Drew Days", and the class is then cancelled after bidding. Having wasted a first-choice slot, one gets into absolutely no other limited-enrollment classes either. I don't mind getting the short straw from time to time, but it would be nice if the system were designed in a way that minimized the influence of random chance on one's law school schedule. International Trade for me, I guess.

My birthday having come and gone I am now free from my self-imposed book-buying moratorium. On the way home from Indiana I polished off Gregory Rabassa's If This Be Treason, which are his relatively disjointed thoughts on the enterprise of literary translation.

Supposedly, his project is to decide whether translation can ever be non-criminal or whether, as Nabokov is said to have said, it is just a question of whether it is a felony or a misdemeanous. In reality, Rabassa devotes about 3 pages to that question, about 30 to odds and ends from his life, and the remainder of the book to little squibs on all of the translations he has done, from famous (Marquez's Cien Anos de Soledad). [I will spoil the "ending" by revealing that Rabassa eventually decides that the question hasn’t been proven beyond the necessary presumption of innocence—for Article III, sec. 3 buffs, this is probably to say that while translation may be treason, we have not yet come up with the requisite two eyewitnesses to the same overt act.]

Anyway, Rabassa says that he is a better translator than he is a writer of original thought, and this is decidedly true. Which isn’t to say that his disjointed thoughts are bad, or that the book isn’t interesting, just that it reads more like a sort of meandering magazine interview with himself than an actual book. Nonetheless, 19 books down.

[50 Book Challenge]