I didn't realize this when I wrote my post on porn, but it happens to be Protection from Pornography Week! How about that? Also, Gary Trudeau weighs in here, here, here, here, here, here, and Dan Drezner comments here. But what makes most sense to me is this fantastic e-mail from reader Dimitriy Masterov, which manages to bring the whole discussion very appropriately back around to my favorite topic, the wretched state of contemporary courtship:

To preface my comments, I don't like pornography and I don't really want to defend it. I also think the quality of interaction between men and women is, in some ways, at an all-time low. But I think there is little evidence to suggest that pornography is a substitute for healthy interactions between them, at least on average. Naomi Wolf's libido-deadening pornography is a figment of her overactive imagination, as your own casual empiricism indicates. Survey microdata collected by Edward Laumann reveals that Americans do not use pornography to compensate for lack of sexual contact. In fact, autoerotic behavior (which lumps together everything from attending strip clubs to phone sex to masturbation) is associated with higher levels of partnered sexual activity. Both men and women who are highly autoerotic are more likely to have multiple sexual partners in a short period of time. Moreover, use of pornography is highly correlated with diversity of sexual practices. Thus the first-order insecurity explanation also doesn't hold water, unless you have a much more nuanced idea of insecurity, wherein heightened sexual activity is evidence of a search for affirmation rather than of a rampant libido.

As for the college boys you wrote about, I am not sure their behavior was harmful, but it was vulgar, like much behavior of males who live away from home for the first time. I suspect that their behavior was intended to show you (and each other) that they were experienced in matters of the boudoir, to exploit those correlations that I mentioned above. The ubiquitous pornography was akin to that fellow we all knew in high school displaying the same well-worn condom he carried in his wallet like some sort of prurient badge or medal. It is silly, but it is a symptom of the demise of courtship, a more subtle (and innocent) tear in the social fabric than the moral failure that pundits from every part of the political spectrum rail about on talk radio. The sexual urges of young men and women used to have a well-defined and efficient set of rituals that steered them, but when such traditions are cast out, they are replaced by the shabby hooking-up we have today. And in this world, is there a better way to signal your romantic prowess than to show that sex is no big deal, that it is something casual, something that is so ordinary that of course it is to be found on your desktop next to the paper you're working on. A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive the onslaught of public excess. There is a Gresham's law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended, which is something we are all increasingly loath to take on. Instead, culture and morality are something we have have come to expect for our government to preserve for us.

Well, for once I have nothing to add 'cause I just could not have said that better myself.

Also, Eve Tushnet thinks we should all read Sabbath's Theater.

The always-insightful Vice Squad has an insight:

And if I were to be so rash as to speculate upon motives, I might
suggest that most folks who argue against a policy proposal on futility grounds
actually oppose the proposal precisely because they fear that it would not be
futile.)

So my brother's too modest to tout it himself, but he's got a great one-act play up over here. A random excerpt:

Simon: Hey, Andy? This isn't really a good time.

Andy: [checks watch] What, 6:30? That's, like, one of my favorite times!

Simon: I'm going to pretend you didn't say that.

Yesterday I had a repeatedly-updated post on Lawrence Solum's Amazon Top Ten List, and Professor Leiter's reply. Now Lawrence Solum responds.

Filisteu has posted covers of a couple of translated Nabokov paperbacks. They're rather . . . umm. . . not-entirely-work-safe. I'm reminded, of course, that Nabokov originally had trouble publishing Lolita, and originally the only person willing to touch it was some French pornographer. I guess VN would have seen the "translated" covers as the final part of fate's cruel joke. (Nabokov detested many translators, and after he corrected dozens of horrifying errors in the French and Russian translations of Lolita, he wondered helplessly what had found its way into the Arabic version. . .)

[The book on the right in the pictures, "Triangulo Sensual" is known in English as "Laughter in the Dark."]

Here's a poem by Rita Dove to start off the month (thanks to Maggie Samuels-Kalow):

NOVEMBER FOR BEGINNERS

Snow would be the easy
way out-- that softening
sky like a sigh of relief
at finally being allowed
to yield. No dice.
We stack twigs for burning
in glistening patches
but the rain won't give.

So we wait, breeding
mood, making music
of decline. We sit down
in the smell of the past
and rise in a light
that is already leaving.
We ache in secret,
memorizing

a gloomy line
or two of German.
When spring comes
we promise to act
the fool. Pour,
rain! Sail, wind,
with your cargo of zithers!

Dear readers,

Thank you all for reading us this past month. There are a whole lot more of you than there have ever been before[the stats say 8233 unique visitors for October], and (truth be told) I don't know exactly why you've all suddenly stumbled upon us, though I'm very grateful. So I'd like to encourage you all to send me (or any of us) an email telling what you like or hate about the blog, generally, and what it is that has induced, or will induce, you to keep reading.

Should we add more permanent bloggers? Should we avoid getting the blog too crowded? A different archive system? Is there somebody you'd really like to see answer 20 Questions for us? Should we add comments? Any and all feedback is welcome.

The not-so-bad downside of this is that my co-blogger Ms. Lamboley tells me we're going to have to buy more bandwidth than I'd originally estimated, but I'm definitely not complaining. And we're certainly not going to add a PayPal tip jar to try to turn this blog into anything other than the labor of love that it is (though obviously each of us displays differing levels of love and obsession for it). If you want to get us money to support our new bandwidth-buying, you'll have to click on the book links to the right and buy something.

Of course, that would be a pretty silly reason to do it, but you should think about buying some of those books anyway, because they're good.

Finallly, extra thanks to all the bloggers big and small who have linked to us this month, especially the Volokh Conspirators, the Oxbloggers, Howard Bashman, Lawrence Solum, Dan Drezner, Pejman Yousefzadeh, Matthew Yglesias, and so many more that this list can't even begin to pretend to be exhaustive.

Thanks,
Will

Readers know I've been very curious about how the Simon/Garfunkel reunion tour will go. I've been cautiously optimistic, and Matt Reece's brief review seems to reinforce this optimism, and the caution.

. . . to my chain-smoking ex-classmate Mr. Coates, who soundly beat me on the LSAT.

It always amuses me to see how others view the University of Chicago. [Over here in Cambridge the usual response is "I've heard of the city of Chicago", except among econ-types where the response is "Oh, Milton Friedman!" (Mention Gary Becker, James Heckman, Steven Levitt, or Richard Posner and you draw blank looks)]. Anyway, Brian Leiter sums it up thusly:

Chicago is perceived as "hard" and "nerdy," so all the horny valedictorian boys apply elsewhere

Via Vice Squad, I see that it will soon (generally) be legal to smoke marijuana in the streets of Cambridge. If the behaviour of my friends at and after dinner tonight is any indication, they're mostly too busy getting wasted to get stoned, but I'll keep an eye out to see if any avail themselves of the decriminalization in January.

Howard Bashman, DMB fan?

Much as I hate to so roundly criticize my guest, Sara Butler's at it again. She writes:

The point of getting married is to start a family; marriage is what transforms a "couple" into a "family." The idea that marriage is just about two people is what has lead to its erosion. (emphasis mine)

No, this won't be the usual list of random blog-entries. Will's currently reading the rather addictive fantasy novels of Terry Pratchett. From Sourcery:

THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death.
"What does it contain, then?"
ME.
"Besides you I mean!"
Death gave him a puzzled look. I'M SORRY?
The storm reached its howling peak overhead. A seagull went past backwards.
"I meant," said Ipslore, bitterly, "what is there in this world that makes living worth while?"
Death thought about it.
CATS, he said eventually, CATS ARE NICE.

(Via En Banc): Brian Leiter criticizes Lawrence Solum's Top Ten Jurisprudence Books List, and supplies his own. Cleverly, Leiter manages to agree with Solum on three choices (Hart, Dworkin, and Finnis), quarrely with him on three, (Barnett, Kennedy, Shiner), briefly mention one (Fuller), and claim that two of them simply aren't books on jurisprudence at all (Ackerman, Rawls). The book Leiter refuses to mention at all, but loudly leaves off his own list? Richard Posner's Economic Analysis of Law. It doesn't even get a refutation.

(For more forthright criticism of Law and Econ, see this En Banc post).

UPDATE:

Professor Leiter writes in:

I didn't mention Posner, because the same point applies to him as to Rawls and
Ackerman: it's not jurisprudence, at least not in any recognizable sense.

1. a. Knowledge of or skill in law.

b. The science which treats of human laws (written or unwritten) in general; the philosophy of law.

Jurisprudence stands to law as philosophy of science stands to science. In both cases, we're interested in certain abstract theoretical questions about what there is (and the nature of what there is) and about how we know (and whether we know) what there is. In the case of law, this means the jurisprudential questions of significance revolve around (a) what does it mean to say that "law" exists in some society, i.e., what has to be the case for there to be law, how do we demarcate (should we demarcate?) "law" from the other kinds of norms characteristic of human societies (moral norms, aesthetic norms, norms of etiquette), and what kind of normative system is law (i.e., what kind of reasons for action do legal systems supply as distinct from other kinds of normative systems--and how good are those reasons?); and (b) how do we know what the law is (given its nature, per (a)), e.g., what structures of reasoning (if any) justify claims about what the law is, to what extent do existing adjudicative mechanisms approximate appropriate structures of reasoning, and so on.

Ackerman, Posner, and Rawls do not, by and large, offer answers to these questions, though Ackerman and Posner, in particular, seem to presuppose certain answers to them (and Posner, in other writings, does have some explicit answers to some of these questions, but not in his Economic Analysis of Law). Kennedy offers some explicit answers to some of these questions, but they are poorly formulated and philosophically insubstantial. Barnett fares somewhat better than Kennedy on the core jurisprudential questions, but not as well as Hart, Raz, et al.

Much as I do enjoy reading Dahlia Lithwick's Jurisprudence columns for Slate, The Curmudgeonly Clerk defeats her on the merits. Of course, The Clerk defeats most people on the merits, so I generally try hard to avoid arguing with him.

Pejman Yousfzadeh stages a perhaps unwitting raid on Brad DeLong, and DeLong finds his comments seized by trolls, which take a great deal of effort to police.

Indeed, I've always been impressed by Pejman's ability to keep his commenters relatively under control. My understanding is that he accomplishes this only by weilding a pretty heavy dictatorial hand.

Long-time (or even short-time) readers will already know about my anti-comments crusade. So I have little pity for DeLong. Indeed, maybe part of the reason for my bias is that I've always been pretty closely connected to the QuizBowl blog-ring, which has a chronic troll problem (though it comes and goes).

Dear readers, I appreciate you all very much, and nearly every email I've received has been interesing, informative, valuable, or all three. Similarly, I appreciate every blogger who links to us with a comment or criticism. These are the interchanges that make blogging great. It's just my casual empirical judgment that the added "feedback" one gets from adding an easy-to-use comments system and letting y'all go to town rarely results in anything constructive for anybody.

I try very hard to keep up on my correspondence, and to blog a lot of it, to make up for our lack of comments, and I've taken some polls among my co-bloggers. Despite the fact that Movable Type makes comments relatively easy, we don't seem likely to change our mind.

So if Professor DeLong is willing to turn his blog over to the trolls, more power to him. As to you, dear readers, your emails and links are always welcome.

(This post with thanks to Jacob Levy)

Caitlin Flanagan, a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, is one of the most intelligent observers of modern womanhood that I've encoutered recently. She had an incredibly interesting tribute to the '50s housewife back in the September issue, and in November, she takes a look at weddings, jilted women, and how we think of marriage. Some of her observations help to explain what I think is wrong with the way Amanda sees marriage.

Amanda wrote:

I could understand, and I might agree with her, if she had instead written that the point of dating was to find someone you loved and who loved you. But why must this result in marriage (and what, Ms. Butler, is the point of dating for those people who can't legally marry)? That question aside, I'd say the most powerful argument against marriage is the desire to have no legal, contractual bonds connecting you to your partner: you will stay together because, each and every day, this is the life and future you want, a bond that isn't officially recognized by society or vowed before God or enforcable in court (assuming none will claim you were married at common law).

The objection, I suspect, is that marriage is a declaration before society that two people are a couple. I don't find this very convincing. Etiquette doesn't demand rings, so I'm not sure part of society does. It also remains to be explained to me why I care for society's recognition of my bond with my partner, especially since this word 'society' tends to be used in a way that suggests I don't really have any personal acquaintance with most of the people who comprise it.

Basically, I think that Amanda fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of marriage, which is not "society's recognition of my bond with my partner." Beyond my friendly feelings and general good will for Amanda, neither I nor society particularly cares if she bonds with someone else or not. Neither do we care if they want to declare themselves a "couple," which is what happens when you start an exclusive relationship with someone, not what happens when you get married. The point of getting married is to start a family; marriage is what transforms a "couple" into a "family." The idea that marriage is just about two people is what has lead to its erosion. In fact, if all Amanda is looking for is someone she loves and who loves her, I would totally agree with her that she should not get married. I think our high divorce rate and the current fragility of marriage can largely be blamed on a culture that thinks that marriage is all about proclaiming how much one individual loves another individual, which absolutely does not encompass all that marriage is. It is about two individuals coming together and becoming a family - not two individuals who are merely conntected by "legal, contractual bonds." Ms. Flanagan writes:

Consider the Almost Brides, an astonishing number of whom allude in their tales of woe to children: children they have borne to their fiancés, or to other men, or children that their fiancés have sired with previous wives or girlfriends. That these broken engagements (many of which ended in rage fests followed by what psychotherapists usually describe as "sexual acting out" on the part of the Almost Brides) may also have constituted periods of significant loss and grieving for these children—who suddenly had to bid good-bye to a person they had expected would be a parent—goes entirely and shamefully unmentioned in There Goes the Bride. Such is the lot of children in our culture: absent stigmas on divorce or single parenting or illegitimacy, with religion often a governing factor in people's lives only to the extent that it is a boon rather than a constricting force, a child's fate in life is entirely dependent on the sexual and romantic whims of his parents. And come wedding time, the child is considered merely a cast member, a cunning little ring bearer or flower girl or—worst-case scenario—sulking adolescent in a shiny new suit of clothes, rather than someone whose life is about to be profoundly (if perhaps temporarily) affected by the events at hand.

We get married to start families, and families exist for the sake of having children. The institution of marriage doesn't exist for the sake of personal fulfillment, but to ensure that children grow up in stable home with both of their parents. But on the whole, we don't see marriage that way any more, as Ms. Flanagan writes:

Whereas a wedding once provided young people with a moment of transformation so powerful that even a modestly funded event was a momentous one, nowadays —with marriage an iffy bet and with most betrothed couples having already helped themselves to all the liberties of adulthood—the only way to underline the moment is to put on an elaborate and costly show.

Given the way marriage has eroded in the 20th century, I'm not surprised that Amanda finds it unappealing. And I might almost agree that marriage compromises romantic ideals. Marriage forges a bond of familial duty between the two married persons and the children they have; while lovers' duty is to their own feelings and no one else. In some sense, the two are fundamentally incompatible. Happily for us modern persons who can't bear the thought of marrying without love, Jane Austen managed to reconcile the two rather nicely, although I don't think her solution is viable for everyone, founded as it is, on virtue.

Well now, some interesting news has surfaced today about Bush's so-called "forest management." As California continued to burn this week, the Senate took up the issue of forest thinning as a means for preventing forest fires. The bill passed the Senate by a 80-14 vote. Included in the Senate bill is the appropriation of "$760 million in additional federal money" for the project.

Despite the dominant rhetoric of public safety concerns in this deregulation of public lands, it appears painfully obvious that the public interest has really been trumped by private interests. Indeed, the Times article notes:

The Senate beat back a string of amendments, including those that would have required more financing for firefighters, greater judicial review of logging decisions...

Here comes the kicker. The (in-)action of George Bush probably made California's fortunes worse. Apparently, back in April, Gov. Gray Davis had requested federal funds to clear out thousands of acres of forest that had been ravaged by a beetle infestation. The infestation had left many trees in the area dead, and thus more susceptible to fire. The Bush Administration turned down that request, and now those same forest lands are burning.

So what are we left with? A $2 billion crunch on California's already beleaguered economy, 730,000 charred acres, 2600 burned homes, 20 people dead, and 1 new forest management bill that gives no financing to firefighters and further removes the control of public lands from public hands. Oh yeah, and the taxpayers will foot the bill for $760 million. All this from a President who had the opportunity to lessen the threat of catastrophic forest fire in California, but chose not to do so.

The way these events have played out bring Bush's motives for the forest management bill (public safety, remember?) into serious doubt. As the Times article notes, "...opponents, including environmental groups and some leading Democrats, described the bill as a giveaway to timber companies that would allow unfettered logging while suppressing citizens' complaints." They may be onto something.

Quoth my Social/Political Sciencce supervisor, Dr. Julie Smith:

You've got this tendency to put anything really interesting you have to say safely inside parentheses.

We are, of course, utterly grateful for all links to our humble blog. Sometimes, though, we wish we spoke Portuguese so that we knew what people were saying about us, particularly when we know just enough to to tell that Nabokov's Ada figures into the post as well.

UPDATE: The posts author writes in with a translation:

This time I even saved money (a reference to the 49th Book Fair of Porto Alegre). I doubt I will find again something like Nabokov's Ada in those discount bins, but let's wait and see.

Oh, and according to this silly test, my political inclination is that of a social libertarian and an economial centrist, with a neglectable tilt to the left in economy. [Link stolen from Crescat Sententia.]

From this New York times article on increasing obesity in Europe:

Obese people suffer a wide range of illnesses and disabilities, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. But unlike smoking, eating is not outright harmful to health, so it is more difficult to control by legislation.

In fact, one might even go so far as to say that eating in moderation is beneficial to one's health.

I'll be up in north Texas for the weekend, where I may or may not find some answers to the ongoing debate of whether marriage is the be-all, end-all of dating. The handsome groom I'm off to see is my cousin. That is, I'll inquire if it's appropriate to ask such questions during the reception following a ceremony at which the bride's father, a Southern Baptist preacher, has officiated. Somehow I'm suspecting that the answer to that subquestion will likely be a resounding "not appropriate", and such theoretical questions are best left for the winery to which my immediate family may retreat (should that happen, I'll report on the quality of Dallas-area wines).

Everybody is all atwitter about Justice Janice Rogers Brown's supposed praise of Lochner. Let's roll the tapes, shall we?

[All of this starts at the beginning of the after-lunch session]

Here is Senator Schumer speaking in his opening statement:

Schumer: In Justice Brown's case she's remarkably straightforward in her praise of the Lochner case, and her criticism of Judge Holmes's famous dissent there, calling Judge Holmes simply wrong. Even Judge Bork praised the lochner dissent. . . If you asked most lawyers to name the worst of Supreme Court Decisions in the 20th century, Lochner would be at the top of the list. Justice Brown thinks it was correctly decided. Even Justice Scalia, who so often advocates cutting back on Congress's power to protect basic rights is content to let the states do so themselves. . .
Let's go to your own record. In Santa Monica Beach vs. Superior Court, you called the "demise of the Lochner era, the revolution of 1937."

I do not advocate a return to the era of Lochner v. New York, when courts routinely struck down economic regulations under the due process clause, thereby inhibiting the ability of government to restore confidence to the marketplace and to prevent exploitation of those who have little bargaining power. Appropriate regulation can serve to foster, not tax, economic growth and social well-being by creating and maintaining an environment conducive to beneficial commerce. On the other hand, I do advocate judicial reasoning that is clear and credible. No fair assessment of the words, " 'substantially advance' the 'legitimate state interest' sought to be achieved" (Nollan, supra), can equate them with a rule that limits compensable "takings" of private property to government action that is "arbitrary." Moreover, we can apply the high court's "substantially advance" standard faithfully, while still maintaining the appropriate deference to legitimate government efforts to regulate the use of private property. . .
The majority's call to deference thus rests on an unspoken and critical assumption: that property merits only an inferior level of protection. That conclusion, a historical artifact of the demise of the Lochner era, N2 has no defensible constitutional provenance.

N2: Lochner ( Lochner v. New York (1905)) is the name that has come to symbolize judicial usurpation of power. But the problem with Lochner was not that it sought to make judicial review meaningful or that it deemed economic interests worthy of protection. The Lochner court was justly criticized for using the due process clause "as though it provided a blank check to alter the meaning of the Constitution as written." ( Harper v. Virginia Bd. of Elections (1966))The "revolution of 1937" ended the era of economic substantive due process but it did not dampen the court's penchant for rewriting the Constitution. Although the court left the protection of property interests largely to the mercy of legislatures, it continued to apply substantive due process to the protection of civil liberties. "As several of the Justices have noted in dissent, there is only a verbal difference between the 'fundamental rights' branch of the compelling governmental interest test and the now discredited substantive due process doctrine of such cases as Lochner. . . . Both of them leave the Court entirely at large, with full freedom to enact its own natural law conceptions. The only difference is in the type of interests that are protected . . . ." (Lusky, By What Right? (1975))

Schumer: Do you stand by your views in Santa Monica Beach v. Superior Court about the demise of the Lochner era and the revolution of 1937?
Brown: (long pause) (sigh) Well, the cases . . . say what they say, and I hope that I always try to do an analysis that is very accessible, that anybody who reads it can understand what I've sad.
Schumer: So you do stand by them.
Brown: (shaking her head) I have tried to write--
Schumer: (interrupting) You can answer that yes or no.
Brown: Well, the cases are there. I guess that's--
Schumer: (interrupting) So the answer is yes?
Brown: Well, the concern I have, Senator, is that you started off making a lot of statements...
Schumer: (interrupting) But--
Hatch: (interrupting) Let her answer the question
Brown: ...about what that was and what my views were and what that meant. So all I'm saying is what's in the cases is in the cases, and it should be clear.
Schumer: I'm gonna take that as, you stand by those views, 'cause you haven't refuted them here, and you said what's in there is in there. Thank you Mr. Chairman.
Hatch: Well let me just say I don't take it that way I take it that, Senator you've interpreted the way you want to, but that's not the way I meant--
Schumer: (interrupting) Well, Mr. Chairman it's a simple yes or no question...
Hatch: (interrupting) No it isn't
Schumer: ...do you stand by them or do you not stand by them...
Hatch: (interrupting) No it isn't
Schumer: ...and we can't get a yes or no.
Hatch: No it isn't, because she has consistently explained throughout this whole hearing that she has . . . she put this language into those opinions, and that language deserves to be interpretedly differently from the way you've interpreted it. It isn't just a simple yes and no-- yes or no. No. And I think that's a fair statement, isn't it?
Brown: Yes.
Hatch: In other words, you don't have to take Senator Schumer or my interpretation of what your cases say, but to try and paint you like you're back in the Lochner era, without understanding what Lochner is all about I think is just wrong. You do understand it.
Brown: Mr. Chairman, if I may I do need to follow up on something, because the prologue to your (gesturing to Schumer) question was quite long, and you made a statement that "you're obviously out of the mainstream, you clearly take positions that not even very conservative judges take." And you base that on this idea that I want to return to Lochner, that I said Lochner was rightly decided. I have never said that. In fact, in my cases I have actually said that to the extent that the Lochner Court was using the using Due Process Clause as a blanck check to simply insert their political views into the Constitution, that they were justly criticized. And I've also said that that portion of the Holmes dissent which is simply reflecting a deference to the legislature is one that I generally agree with.
Schumer: Do you agree with the holding of Lochner?
Brown: I have said that I think that it's appropriately criticized, and it's been discredited. I mean, Lochner is this curious case that has actually ended up creating a new word in the English language (laughing). And I think I've even said that it's the most pejorative thing that you can say, among attorneys.
Schumer: You don't agree with the holding of Lochner?
Brown: I think that I've been clear. I said that it is appropriately criticized to the extent that they were inserting their views into this case. Or into the Constitution, I guess. That's the issue.
Schumer: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I had a difference of opinion with this idea that the Framers of the Constitution had no economic notion. I think it's very clear, when you read the history, that there was a concern about property, that the American Revolution was a revolution that was really fought over property. That one of the reasons that the Constitution came into being instead of just modifying the articles of confederation, was that there was concern about what legislative majorities were doing with property. So both in the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights, that concern finds expression in specific language.

Previously, I wondered why Kaplan LSAT classes didn't offer some form of performance-based pay. A reader who works for Kaplan writes in:

Kaplan actually now gives students the option of a refund if their test scores don't increase over a baseline (either the diagnostic or a previous score). There are various qualifiers (one must take the test either at the next testing date or within 30 days for self-scheduled tests like the GRE), and if your score goes up but not as high as you'd like, the most you can do is retake the class for free, but it's moving closer to your system.

Another of the requirements (and one that we're required to explain in a 30-minute orientation, as well as at the end of every class) is that students can only miss 2 classes and must do their required homework (maybe 1-2 hours per weekly or biweekly class). Teachers can see if students are doing the online portion of their required homework; only a few do it. It is amazing how many students pay out $1000 for this class and then don't do a bit of work, especially since Kaplan classes emphasize practice and familiarity with question types. Since my older students are much better about doing their homework, I suspect that parents pay all or most of the fee for their children, even for GRE courses, decreasing the economic imperative to do well. This problem is even worse for ACT/SAT classes.

Anyhoo, in short, it seems a little mean to possibly penalize test prep teachers for having students who refuse to do the work necessary to the class. What do you think of a program that has the pay-scale you spoke of, but does have some sort of student participation requirement?

A few days ago, I had a post on Adam White's challenge to Liberals, which I extended to thinkers of all political stripes. What law do you think would be a good law, but an unconstitutional one. (And it's important that you think the law actually does violate the constitution, however you'd interpret it, not just that the Supreme Court have said so).

I got some interesting answers. Here they are, with thoughts.

Tim Sandefur suggests the Line-Item Veto. Personally, I'm not at all convinced that it ought to be unconstitutional, but the non-delegation doctrine, the presentment clause, and all of their derivations have always pretty much baffled me as a formal matter (if not as an economic one). You can read the opinion here and decide for yourself.

Another reader writes in with a triple whammy of interesting suggestions:

I think that Representatives should be paid the median American household income as determined annually by the census bureau. Alas, this conflicts with Article I, Section 6, since it could go up or down during a given term.

Further, I think that budget bills should be able to originate in the Senate, but that conflicts with Article I, Section 7.

Finally, I think that the federal government should be able to enforce certain privacy restictions on data gatherers and distributors, but I do not believe that there is a federal constitutional right to privacy, and that Amendment X reserves that to the States.

Apparently, I straddle the line between libertarian and authoritarian. Hmm, well, yeah, probably. Take the quiz here.

UPDATE: Will demands a recount, insisting I'm more authoritarian than that. I just think Will doesn't understand what I'm after. I'd like to shrink the state quite a bit, but I'd also like people to govern themselves a little bit more.

Instapundit links to Naomi Wolf's latest, an anti-porn essay. The gist of her argument is:

[Andrea Dworkin] was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

I wasn't totally sold on Ms. Wolf's argument when I read through it for the first time, but then, reading some of the critical responses from the blogosphere that Instapundit also linked to, I didn't find those particularly satisfying either, so here are just a few scattered thoughts of my own. This won't be that coherent 'cause it's not something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and this is mostly just my gut reaction.

The porn-defenders chalk a lot of stuff up to plain old insecurity. Men, particularly college students, use porn a lot because they are insecure and worry about getting rejected by real women. Porn is the symptom, not the cause of their less-than-healthy attitudes toward women, sex and relationships. It's not that they don't want to have sex with real women any more, and it's not that they have ridiculous expectations of women sexually, they're just too nervous about asking Sally to the movies because she might say no. Fair enough, but then it seems to me you also have to at least admit that porn isn't exactly the best remedy to these young men's condition; in fact, it would seem to it make it worse. Plus this whole "that's just the way college is" attitude kind of bothers me. Sure, college kids are immature, but the point is hopefully over four years they'll actually grow-up a little bit, and neither using porn to deal with insecurity nor a culture that just dismisses their immaturity or their porn use as the way things are contribute to the process of becoming a secure, confident, functioning adult.

One of the porn-defenders seemed to turn around and admit that there are guys who expect girls to act like porn stars, but that they're just stupid frat boys and girls should just have a little self-respect because there are plenty of normal guys out there. Again, there's some truth to this. Girls should have more self-respect, but on the other, if it's okay for the guys to be insecure, why can't the girls be too? I mean, they're going to be whether you like it or not, that's just the way people are in college, right? Can we say "double standard?"

The other thing about this is that it's not just stupid frat boys who are porn-obsessed; it's otherwise "normal" guys (here's another article about young professional men and porn. Guess what? It's not just frat boys and they're not growing out of it). My first year at Chicago, the boys who lived on the floor below me were pretty constant consumers of online pornography. I'd go down there to say hi, and even if one of them was considerate enough to close the window on his computer, it didn't matter because the background picture on his desktop was some naked chick with Britney Spear's head photoshopped on, or, if I was lucky, just a mostly naked Victoria's Secret model. This wasn't in a frat house; this wasn't in any kind of all-male environment; it was in a co-ed dorm. They clearly weren't going to change, so the girls just kind of got used to it.

Now, the thing is, by and large, they weren't bad guys. And a lot of them, come to think of it, didn't seem all that insecure. Many of them seemed quite confident of their ability, say, to get two girls to make out with each other, and, sadly, with good reason. Sure, girls don't have to do that, but guys also don't have to contribute to an environment in which girls think that that's what they have to do if they ever want a boyfriend. It's a vicious cycle, and obviously there are other things that contribute, but I'm at a loss to see how pornography does anything but make it worse.

Like I said, this is just my initial reaction. If you have your own opinions (and I know you do), feel free to drop me line, and maybe I'll do a follow-up post in a day or two when I've thought through this some more.

From Neill Nugent's The Government and Politics of The European Union:

Conceptualising, which essentially means thinking about phenomena in abstract terms . . .

A while ago Dan Drezner criticized Atrios for blogging anonymously, while I disagreed. Owing to recent events, Drezner takes it back.

(Via the Curmudgeonly Clerk) Well, everybody else is doing it, so I thought I would too. Apparently I'm a right-Libertarian. There's a shock to everyone, I'm sure. Lawrence Solum is collecting the results for the blogosphere.

Pejman has decided to buy W.S. Merwin's translation of Dante's Purgatorio, thanks to my "unimpeachable" recommendation. I'm honored.

He wonders whether there are other Merwin translations of The Comedy. There aren't. Merwin's (moving) introduction has a good discussion of why Purgatorio, which I touched briefly on in this post, but otherwise you'll have to read the book (or figure out a clever Amazon search) to find it.

Anyway, I want to take a paragraph to stump for Merwin's Purgatorio once again. You can buy it from Amazon using our nice little clicky-link at the sidebar (and yes, we do get a small cut if you use those links to buy anything from Amazon). If you liked Inferno, you ought to like Purgatorio as well. Purgatorio is to Inferno what . . . satisfied retirement is to exuberant youth, or what deep sleep is to passionate sex.

Our friends over at Begging to Differ have been reviewed at "The Weblog Review," but their reader rating is looming close to 4 out of 5. So help us skew their rating. If you like the site, click through and give them a 5. If you don't, don't bother, it isn't worth your time.

Alright, I'll start by admitting that I have a vested interest in gifted education and magnet schools. I was in the gifted program from pre-school to eighth grade. Both of my elementary schools offered gifted, magnet, and regular education; my middle school offered only gifted classes and magnet classes. My high school was an academic magnet (ie, all-around academic, rather than dedicated science or dedicated humanities, a model that I think encourages specialization at too young an age). There was one exception to this pattern: for the second semester of 2nd grade, I attended a regular elementary school in Alexandria, VA. That school system, including the school I attended (sorry, don't remember the name), is generally considered to be of far higher than than East Baton Rouge Parish's school system (just to make the meanings clear: parish = public; parachial = private).

Another Rice Grad recently blogged

It reminds me of when I was debating school vouchers at Rice, and a girl from Thomas Jefferson (a very, very prestigious magnet school in Northern Virginia) gave me the cream-skimming argument. I was absolutely dumbfounded. Here she was at TJ, which for all relevant purposes is a publicly-funded private school. And yet she was brazen enough to offer the cream-skimming argument against vouchers, seemingly unaware how hypocritical it made her look.

[do you remember how, in elementary school, if one kid was acting up, his punishment was to have to go and sit next to someone who was well-behaved? God, I hated that. It was like I was being punished for not throwing pencils or eating paste... I had to sit next to the kid who was. Wonderful discipline. And no, it didn't really work to calm down the miscreants.]

I went to Baton Rouge High, the best in the public school in town. There were two other sources of a decent public high school education in the parish: McKinley High's gifted high school program (but its regular classes were poor) and the academic magnet which enrolled magnet students from the north half of the parish, and also had a science & engineering program for the whole parish. Neither of those had the breadth in humanities and languages that we did. None of the other public high schools had more than two or three AP classes.

We consistently offered AP classes in English III, English IV, Am Hist, Euro Hist, Comp Sci, Calc AB, Calc BC, Bio, Chem, Physics, Latin, French, and Spanish; it also offered German through the 4th year, and, depending on what teachers were currently hired, two years' of Classical Greek, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Polish, and Arabic. We did not offer remedial courses, auto mechanics, home ec, or business skills; unlike the other high schools, we did not waste money on a football, cheerleading, basketball, baseball, or softball team (or field hockey or lacrosse, but no one in state has that). Specialization: put all the students who want to study certain equipment-intensive subjects in one school, place all the teachers who are qualified to teach those subjects in the same place.

It would be incredibly ineffecient to offer all those courses listed above at all the schools in the parish: there simply aren't enough students qualified, or interested, in taking them, even once you spread the 1000 Baton Rouge High students around so there's 30 in each school (even at BRHS, only about 150 students took those AP courses). You've also got to divy up with them the AV equipment for the satellite-taught Japanese course, the gel electophoresis equipment for Bio, and the fancy physics contraptions that hook up measuring devices to computers (these were either purchased thanks to grants the teachers wrote, or wheedled out of LSU).

And most crucially, you've got to divide up the qualified teachers across the parish. My high school called its calc teacher out of retirement three times before he finally quit coming back. Why? Because despite being a high-performing magnet school without behavior problems, they still couldn't convince anyone to come teach there. The last I heard, the calc teacher is someone who's not actually qualified to teach at that level, but he was called up after the last guy quit to make twice as much refurbishing BMWs.

Will and Another Rice Grad, I suppose you have some plan by which you'll magically recruit qualified calc teachers to teach upper-level math classses in all the schools in the parish to which those students are now distributed? I'd really love to hear how you manage to do that. Maybe you'll point to other school systems in other areas of the country that manage to teach AP classes in multiple high schools. Maybe we can then compare the funding of those school systems, property taxes and homestead exemptions, already existing brain- and money- drains to the local parochial school system, and how much those other public systems don't spend on things like ridicuously long on-going deseg suits. And then tell me if you plan works.

Or are you content to let students graduate without the college preparation courses they need, trying desperately to get into universities like Chicago without having taken the four years of math because without calc, they ran out of appropriate math classes their sophomore year, and the admissions committes (fairly accurately) surmise that the rest of their courses weren't very challenging because their schools weren't any good? Believe me, if it weren't for Baton Rouge High, I'd be sitting at Louisiana State Univ. right now instead of here.

clarification: Yes, I realize this doesn't address what some think is a hypocrisy behind opposing vouchers while supporting magnet schools. The point I wanted to make was while magnet schools do concentrate the smart kids in one area, this is a good thing to do. I oppose vouchers for reasons I'll elaborate on later, but I don't have time to go into this topic at the moment. I certainly don't want to sketch out a few first thoughts on the subject and then get attacked for these ideas in their undeveloped form.

My post on the citizenship loyalty oath (in particular the clause to "support and defend" not just The Constitution but also "the laws of the United States") has attracted a lot of reaction, none of it positive. So I've given the post a rather lengthy update.

John Mark Hansen told the story today of Thomas Jefferson, who'd been in France during the Constitutional Convention, asking George Washington about the merits of bicameralism. If you google it, you'll get various versions of the 'quoted exchange,' but essentially it goes like this:

After much discussion around the tea table, Washington turned sharply to Jefferson and said, "You, sir, have just demonstrated the superior excellence of a bi-cameral system by your own hand."

"Oh, how is that?" asked Jefferson.

"You have poured your tea from your cup out into the saucer to cool. We want the bi-cameral system to cool things."

Now, granted I rarely drink from anything as dainty as a teacup and saucer -- my style tends toward the mug or and the mega-mug. I've never found myself tempted to pour my tea or coffee into a saucer to cool it. Even if I were, I can't think that this would be possible without creating a mess. As I imagine it, the pouring onto the saucer isn't the problem so much as the bit of tea that drips down the side of the cup (perhaps the outward-curving lips of the proper tea cup alleviate are better for pouring). Ordinarily, the saucer is supposed to catch that, along with the drip from the spoon (I must be taking this black, else where would I leave that), but I can't set my cup down on that. Now, I've got the tea cup in one hand, which I don't want to set on the white linen tablecloth (no, I don't have one of those) because it will stain, and a saucer of tea, which is so shallow that it probably requires two hands to manage because that tea is spilt with the slightest tilt.

Just how is pouring the tea into a saucer a better idea than having the patience to let it cool a minute or two? (or having a mouth sufficiently desensitized to extremes of heat and spice that you can take it... hmm, what should I make with the other two habanero peppers in my fridge that are a bit much for the Yankee roommate?).

In response to Sara (and Amy and Will):

Stella Gibson pinpoints the real purpose of dating in Cold Comfort Farm (which by a sad misjudgment was omitted from the Observer's list of 100 best books):

"Flora ... dined quietly with intelligent men; a way of passing the evening which she adored, because then she could show off a lot and talk about herself."

So, why does everyone seem to think of dating as an activity that is separable from the particular people involved, for which rules & strategies can be devised? It reminds me of those horrible and misguided tips on how to win friends and influence people that urge you to do things like constantly repeat the name of the person you're speaking to--yuck!

Well, well. Nothing like a little argument on the true Nature and Purpose of Romance, Dating, or Love to get things going. Readers should note that Sara Butler can claim institutional superiority over me here, since she's devoted four years of her college career to trying to answer the question, "What is romantic love and its proper function in human life?". Nonetheless, I think she's really wrong.

Sara writes:

While you can use dating as a means to your own ends, I would suggest that it actually has a purpose of its own, although I recognize this is terribly old-fashioned of me. Ultimately, the point of dating isn't to get laid or have fun or even to discover yourself, but to find a suitable marriage partner. And while I don't think this means that you have to treat every first date with some sort of future-focused gravity, it does mean that dating well requires reference to this end point.

First, there's marriage. A lot of people simply don't want to get married, but don't wish to entirely foreswear romantic contact. Examples might include: A soldier or CIA Agent who knows that she'll frequently be moved from place to place, and would feel guilty disrupting somebody's life by dragging them along (if her emloyers even let her) but would feel even more guilty about asking somebody to sit at home holding a torch for her without knowing if she was alive or dead. Or a man who deeply loves two different women, but could never dream of picking between them. Or somebody with a terminal disease who doesn't want to bond herself "til death do us part" when death is so close around the corner anyway, and she would leave her partner with a much greater well of grief. Or somebody who isn't terminally ill, but who's old enough that death is around the corner all the same. Or somebody who isn't any of those things, but who simply thinks that a marriage commitment is a silly social construct. He might say:

There's only one thing you can really know-- that you love me NOW. At this moment. Don't look beyond. Sometimes a moment seems to contain the whole of beyond inside it-- but that's as close as we come to knowing eternity. It's the only glimpse we get.

[from Tom Stoppard's Dalliance]

(W)e should ask these questions and think about these things rather than just going with whatever feels right to us. These are questions that matter, however you answer them.

David Berstein blogs on a Wall Street Journal article about an increasing trend among employers to ask applicants for their SATs long after graduation from college." He quotes a colleague:

I find this heartening. The SAT is fundamentally an IQ test. While not the only measure of likely productivity on the job, intelligence is probably the most powerful and robust predictor. In the past college of attendance, major, and grades, while always subject to unreliability, were more powerful indices of both intelligence and other productive inputs than they are now. As these other predictors have become more debased it is good to see that the market is responding.

I, on the other hand, am reminded of that passage of Bloom's where he writes that if a young man wishes to woo a young lady these days, he shows her his LSAT scores. Sigh.

Guest blogger Sara Butler writes "Ultimately, the point of dating isn't to get laid or have fun or even to discover yourself, but to find a suitable marriage partner."

Really? I suppose society has failed to clue me in on to that point. Maybe if I had cable so that I could watch Sex in the City's Carrie go for the Russian ballet dancer, I would have been convinced of this point. But no, such is not the case, I haven't heard anything about that relationship since the NYT first announced that would be the upcoming season's plotline.

Granted, she does admit that she "despair[s] of convincing most people that dating ought to lead to marriage and be directed with that endpoint in mind," but there doesn't seem to be much of a point in writing such lines as the one above unless you to hope to convince someone.

I could understand, and I might agree with her, if she had instead written that the point of dating was to find someone you loved and who loved you. But why must this result in marriage (and what, Ms. Butler, is the point of dating for those people who can't legally marry)? That question aside, I'd say the most powerful argument against marriage is the desire to have no legal, contractual bonds connecting you to your partner: you will stay together because, each and every day, this is the life and future you want, a bond that isn't officially recognized by society or vowed before God or enforcable in court (assuming none will claim you were married at common law).

The objection, I suspect, is that marriage is a declaration before society that two people are a couple. I don't find this very convincing. Etiquette doesn't demand rings, so I'm not sure part of society does. It also remains to be explained to me why I care for society's recognition of my bond with my partner, especially since this word 'society' tends to be used in a way that suggests I don't really have any personal acquaintance with most of the people who comprise it.

Miss Manners tackles an etiquette issue near and dear to my heart:

Dear Miss Manners:

In my third year of law school, I have encountered a potential etiquette problem with an upcoming class. The professor is also a local attorney and, at present, an interim judge. Inside the classroom (as well as outside the classroom), how should I refer to the man: as Professor or as Your Honor?

In the past, other students have gotten around the quandary by calling him nothing at all, and although I find that rude, I don't want to commit a horrible error with a judge I will probably appear before in the future.

Context is important, as Miss Manners is sure you have learned in studying case histories. In the context of the class, your professor's title is "professor." When you appear before him in court, preferably in a professional capacity, but however you may find yourself facing him, the title to use is "Your Honor."

It's Wednesday, which is -- next to Sunday -- the best day for the New York Times. Wednesday features the beloved Dining & Wine Section. [In Chicago my roommate and I subscribed to the weekday Times for several months, but eventually stopped because some very-early-riser in our building kept stealing our Wednesday paper, and convenient access to Wednesday was most of the reason she wanted to subscribe.]

Today's Dining Section contains a piece by Marian Burros on taste-testing fast food salads and other healthy offerings, which is not bad, although Slate covered the salads issue much better three months ago. Then there's the requisite weird-food story, in this case about espresso pasta.

Meanwhile Eric Asimov and friends tasted a whole lot of wines that cost more than half a week of my rent. Asimov's pieces are usually worth reading because of the sense you get that he just really likes doing this stuff:

Wines can be divided into any number of categories — that's part of the fun of tasting. Are they conceptual wines that appeal to the head, or soulful wines that go straight to the heart? Are they earthy wines that speak of their soil and region, or are they airy wines that can transport you anywhere? Are they, as the writer Jay McInerney once asked, Lennon wines or McCartney wines?

Tuesday's Chicago Maroon contains the first edition this quarter of my new column. This piece is on the British drinking culture (and mostly just rehashes what I've already said in this blog). The issue also contains a Maroon staff editorial (which I had nothing to do with) making basically the same argument-- that we should give serious thought to liberalizing alcohol policies among college students.

Emily sent me this link a while ago, and I've been meaning ever since to blog on this exciting piece on the future of feminism by Elaine Showalter, the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Princeton and a pioneer of feminist literary criticism:

Feminist ideas in the US and the UK will not generate another mass movement, and individual enterprise may have to replace collective power in bringing about change. The tactics and messages of feminist and equal-opportunity organisations are wrong for the times; strategies and rhetoric that were appropriate in the 1970s need to be re-examined; expectations have to change; communications need to be improved. Even that anathema of the left, free enterprise, could solve some unfinished business of the last women's movement.

At this point, I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and re-read the paragraph. Did she really just say that? Yes, yes she did, and it just gets better. Check out this astounding sentence: "But the problems facing women now are neither readily addressed through legal action nor sufficiently unifying to override individual priorities." And these two mind-blowing paragraphs:

So where do we go from here? If feminism is to endure in this century, I believe, it will require some very fundamental changes of thinking. In the Women's Liberation Movement, our slogan was "The personal is political". Well, that was a necessary point of view. I remember a meeting of the National Organisation for Women (Now) in 1971, when we were asked to sell our wedding rings and other jewellery to raise money for feminist political campaigns. Feminists then had so little economic clout, so little access to power and capital, that any change had to come from pressure on the government.

The slogan needs to be reversed today. Instead of insisting that all personal problems are political and need to be met by legal change, women can be encouraged to be more entrepreneurial and resourceful, and to take responsibility for coming up with exemplary solutions. Contemporary feminism needs to rethink its leftist pieties, and accept and approve women's real power and leadership - especially in fields traditionally regarded with suspicion or horror, such as politics, finance, business, the media and even the military. Rather than lamenting governmental intransigence, we need an emphasis on finding our own solutions to key problems.

This is pretty big deal. I mean, Ms. Showalter writes for The American Prospect! She is the author of Inventing Herself: The Quest for a Feminist Intellectual Heritage! And she's praising free enterprise as liberating women!

Ms. Showalter correctly recognizes the decline of contemporary feminism. Perhaps the most clear evidence of this is the unwillingness of today's women to label themselves feminists, but feminists still usually try to deny the demise of feminism or at least blame it on a conservative backlash instead of their own outdated tactics and agenda. Rather than adapting, feminists have clung all the more to their belief in the need for collective action, and they have tried to convince women of this need with hysterical scare-tactics. "Roe v. Wade is hanging by a thread!" "Bush is using the Patriot Act to create a theocratic patriarchy!" "Wal-Mart is going to eat your children!" Okay, maybe not that hysterical, but it seems that feminists never miss an opportunity to try and motivate us to collective action by telling us we are victims. And the thing is, most of us don't feel like victims, so most of us aren't motivated.

What's so wondeful about this essay is that Ms. Showalter reminds feminists that women have agency all on their own. For many years now, mainstream feminism has de-emphasized women's agency, telling us that we can't solve our own problems, that we need enlightenment from above and help from the government. But that's just not true. Women are now empowered individuals, and any attempt to address the problems that we still face must start from that prin