Well. Three quick hits.

1) Raffi is certainly right. Roasting a chicken is tremendously easy, a great dinner guest / party meal (as with any roast, since it doesn't require maintenance), and tastes fantastic. Personally, I roast the bird at 475 for about forty minutes (or ten minutes a pound), then turn the oven down to 400 and flip her over for the next half hour. And then a week of left-overs.

2) It is Kurtz's obsession with homosexual marriage has produced this "howler" of an article. Just as with his intentional misreading of Scandanavian marriage statistics (for more on this, just Google Andrew Sullivan's site), Kurtz lets his moral convictions blind him to obvious facts (the political composition of the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School). When these simple factual errors are as commonplace as they are in Kurtz's writing, it makes me very skeptical of his analysis of more complicated data. But this is not precisely about Kurtz. I would like to extend this as a criticism of empiricism in the domain of moral thought.

There is an ongoing mini-debate in The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, The National Review & various blogs about both the merit of empirical thinking and which American political party is more empirically minded. But, as Leon Wieseltier noted a few weeks back in one of his Diarists for TNR,

The joke here is on the believers. They hold their faith not because it is popular, but because it is true. If they resort to the argument from numbers, however, they will rob their beliefs of philosophical prestige, and abandon them to the netherworld of popular nonsense. There is strength in numbers, but there is not truth. In this regard, the moral sensibilities of minorities are more refined than the moral sensibilities of majorities. They are never flattered by empiricism, never tempted by triumphalism.

But we should all strive for this sort of moral belief; it is one of the things that distinguishes moral notions from notions of taste or matters of economics. That is, moral notions should not be held in a calculus, to be shifted by available data; they should be, in some real sense, fundamentally incommeasurable. It is our recognition of that incommeasurability that argues for political pluralism (as Isaiah Berlin held), but it is also our recognition of that incommeasurability that preserves the sanctity of our moral holdings. That noumenal faith that what we hold dear is always beyond the phenomenal shore is central to a resistance to a priable and limited materialism; in that it is faith in the idea, if not the omnipotence, of reason, it is the core of rational thought.

3) CSI is the worst television show ever. I would normally extend this honor to Law & Order, with its similar mockery of defendants, but CSI gets a special prize for its didactic war against addiction and substance abusers, its sentimental, puritanical tone, its relentless orgy of evidence, and its complete lack of depth, nuance, sympathy, or aesthetic grace. Plus Caruso is awful. And people wonder why I prefer to watch Degrassi. Seriously, the fact that CSI is so popular, with its revenge fantasies against the only humans who appear on its flickering screen (the criminals, of course), its completely perverse Manichean world-view, and its utterly terrible acting values, puts me ill at ease. Do Americans really get off on watching relentless show-trials, in which the verdict is always known, and only the evidence is suspect? I know that the extension of the law always makes me wary, as its sulfurous light dispels casual interaction—a pragmatism based on the interpretive weight of tradition—and replaces it with litigated formula (Radiohead's dismissal of anti-Solomonic judgment in "Morning Bell" comes to mind), but this dreck is the height of my objection. This is the murder of the juridicial man, as technological indicia and legal minutia remove all capacity for subjective evaluation. Just repulsive.

In the course of procrastinating around on LEXIS I came across a D.C. Circuit opinion decided by the panel of Judge Robert Bork, Judge KEn Starr, and Judge Antonin Scalia. Now that I think about it, I had been dimly aware that all three were D.C. Circuit judges at about the same time, but I had never realized that they must have decided cases together. I now wonder how many there are, and what they are like.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article on finding a good roast chicken in the city. It's a good article, and I'll certainly keep it in mind when I eventually move to New York. But the article's implication that one wouldn't, say, roast their own chicken really annoyed me in a way. Yes, roast chicken is time intensive, in that the thing has to roast. And yes, prices of pre-roasted chickens have dropped to almost equal the high end of raw chickens. Nor is roasting your own chicken necessarily traditional - in fact, in Beirut it's been common since my dad was a kid to send a single unfortunate out to get some farooj, the delicious fire roasted chickens of the lebanese capital, and some fresh bread for ravenous devouring at home (drowned in garlicky yogurt and tahini sauce, and served with tart assorted pickles).

But despite all these arguments in favor of buying your chicken pre-cooked, the home roasted chicken has a lot to be said for it. Of course, you have control over how it's stuffed and flavored. You tend to get a better quality of chicken for the same price if you do the work yourself, and you also get the detritus of roast chicken to use at home - the roasting juices for gravys and potatoes. And as for the time and effort, there's really very little active work in roasting a chicken - once you've flavored and seasoned the bird, all you have to do is put it in the oven and wait. And that wait is leavened by the delicious, permeating, smell of a good chicken, and herbs, and onions and garlic, and the pleasant fug of (unwaxed) lemon. As for the result itself, if you're a fan of the chicken's skin and juicy meat, the home product is much superior. Even if the roasted chicken is right outside your apartment, as tends to be the case in Beirut, the skin is never as crispy, nor the breast as juicy, in even the five minutes it takes to ferry the meal home.

Anyway, the article spurred me to roast a chicken, which I hadn't done for a few weeks then. The pictures start here, but my discussion is below the fold.

1. If you can afford it, get a good chicken, defined as an organic or free range bird of some size. I used a Whole Foods organic chicken that weighed about 4 pounds, and that was certainly enough for a week of eating. Some people wash their chickens before roasting. I suppose it might make sense, but if so, make sure to dry it throughly. There's nothing worse then soggy skinned chicken.

2. Dress the chicken. This, for me, involves olive oil, salt and pepper (remember to rub these things inside too), and a half lemon and thyme stuffed up its bum (to steal a phrase from Nigella Lawson). Somewhat bizarrely, because I happen to like chicken breasts flavored heavily with thyme, I stuff absurb amounts of the herb between the skin covering the breast and the meat. This is probably wrong, but I like the result.

3. Put the chicken in a roasting tray. Mine has a little griddle which holds the chicen above the tray, and also incidentally keeps it relatively compact. If you don't have such a thing, you can go ahead and truss the chicken, tying its legs together, to ensure more even cooking. Or not. The world won't end if you don't.

4. Put the chicken in the oven at 350-400 degrees for about an hour and a half for a 4 pound chicken. I'm told the rule is something like 20 minutes per pound, with half an hour thrown on top. As you can see from the pictures, I intervened halfway through to add some boiled potatoes, which get fattily roasted in the chicken dripping.

5. When it finishes baking, let the chicken rest, then carve. Eat warm that night, and then cold in sandwiches, salads, and other delicious manifestations all week.

To build on Will's post, calling Kurtz's article bizarre is probably generous. The article starts with an unintentionally omitted word in the second sentence ("Emens, who teaches the University of Chicago Law School") and goes downhill from there. Students at U of C law should be gratified that those on the left and right attack its faculty. To those on the right, U of C is fast-becoming (has become?) a hippies commune, led to its demise by Sunstein and Nussbaum. Meanwhile, on the left, the Law School is the center of a heartless corporate conspiracy known as the law & economics movement, spearheaded by Posner(s), Epstein, and others. Fortunately for the students, both sides are wrong. First, to say, as Kurtz does, that the school is "rapidly becoming just another leftist-dominated campus" is ignorant. In addition to Will's listing of Posners Old and Young, Vermeule, Epstein, etc., one could conceivably add Ken Dam (Deputy Secretary of Treasury to Bush II and of State to Reagan), Fischel, and Judges Easterbrook (!), Filip, and Ginsburg, among others. The conservative lights at U of C Law are many and luminous; to imply otherwise is simply wrong.

Further, the suggestion that university should apologize for hiring smart liberal professors is profoundly idiotic and counterproductive. Reading Kurtz's piece one wonders what really offended him: Was it that Emens wrote an article on polyamory, or that she wrote it well? Kurtz praises her as "bold, informed, intelligent, and comprehensive," twice notes that she makes a "sophisticated case," etc. I'm not sure under which principle for running a university Kurtz would have U of C disassociate itself from (i.e., "not "invest[] in") a reasonably thoughtful scholar, but I'm glad that the University of Chicago doesn't subscribe to it. Or perhaps Mr. Kurtz would have the Law School not "invest in" polyamory by directly editing its faculty's scholarship. I'm not sure what Kurtz thinks the U of C should do, but I'm pretty sure it fails to comport with notions of academic freedom and discussion.

In any event, readers need not worry that the University of Chicago Law School is imperiled. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, the school benefits from bright faculty members on both sides of the political divide -- I count this, and the fact that faculty and students with diverse viewpoints regularly meet in intellectual battle, as one of U of C's finest strengths (cf. the National Review). On that note, Chicago-area readers should try to attend tomorrow's panel discussion on Social Security reform, featuring professors Sunstein, Posner (young), Weisbach, Levmore, and Epstein (auditorium, 4:00). Perhaps Mr. Kurtz would prefer a panel discussion featuring only conservatives (or, barring that, only dim-witted liberals); fortunately for U of C students, and, I would venture, the greater legal community, Mr. Kurtz isn't getting his way.

[Aside: I find it funny that Kurtz takes such umbrage at Emen's argument that polygamous marriage would be a positive development for feminists. I read nearly the same argument in Steven Lansberg's Fair Play a few months ago. Landsberg is an economist (U of C PhD) whom one would be foolish to call liberal.]

A few things have wound up in my inbox, and if I don't post them now, I will forget them. Brant Kuehn comes to the defense of wireless access in classrooms (which I did here and here). Steve Sanders invokes Justice Harlan (II) to attack Congressional action in the Schiavo case.

Another reader points out that Stanley Kurtz remains bizarrely fixated on his claim that the University of Chicago Law School is a haven of liberal thought. Of all of the schools in Chicago to go on such a witch-hunt, this seems particularly odd, with both Posners, Vermeule, Epstein, Landes, Currie, all on the faculty there. One almost begins to suspect that Kurtz is just drumming up trouble to help somebody take over the board of trustees.

UPDATE: And, of course Easterbrook, Judge Ginsburg, and Gary Becker teach at Chicago too.

Who among you thought that we couldn't count on the Associated Press to ask the tough questions and to take the leading lights of our society to task for their decisions? For those nay-sayers, I present the following interview, which begins with this powerful opening volley: "What attracted you to doing a sequel to Miss Congeniality?"

About two weeks ago, I noted that putting together a dinner party is hard work. Will seems to have put in a ton of effort yesterday. But in the Weekend Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway writes about serving her (extremely prominent) guests deep-frozen chicken kievs, an avocado with olive oil, and processed Vienetta ice-cream cake. The theory, I take it, is that people don't care about the food if they're laughing and talking.

Afterwards, she emailed all the guests and asked what they thought. The reaction wasn't that positive to the food, but most agreed that they hadn't really noticed. My favorite comment? One guest noted that she and her husband had a 'somewhat disturbed night' afterwards, as a result of the kiev. Alas.

My sense, incidentally, is that some parts of dinner can be creditably bought (cakes, bread, salamis and other cured meats), and others really need to be made by hand. Chicken Kiev is in the latter group. Especially if you mean the kind that cost 99 pence frozen.

Blogging was light yesterday in part because three members of Crescat and some other assorted folks were assembling too much food for Easter dinner-- sweet carrots and raisins, italian bone-in pork roast, zucchini pancakes, spinach soup with scallops, salad with avocado-lemon dressing, saffron mashed potatoes, avocado lemon pie, and white chocolate cheesecake with raspberry coulis. I have taken away from this, 1, two leftover slices of pie and 2, a strong, strong, desire to buy a full-sized Cuisinart rather than the half-pint model I currently scrape by on.