Well, this is weird.

Since I don't know how long that link will live, here's a snap of the entire story:

(caveat: take what follows with a grain of salt. This is the gospel truth about a certain prestigious midwestern university's English Department, as revealed to me by a gossipy, disgruntled grad student in the program. I feel relatively sure that if you found that student, or a similar one, and pressured him or her for information, possibly with a few free drinks, you'd get this story confirmed).

At one point not too long ago, there were eleven people (grad students and faculty) involved in relationships with each other. It may not have been a great status quo, but it worked until one night when some member of the department sent out a drunken email to all grad students and profs listing those eleven names, but not naming the pairings. The situation demanded an official response (why, I don't know). Now, if a grad student and a professor in that department wish to sleep with each other, they have to tell the chair of their intent to do so.

Not all departments on campus have such rules. I've heard Anthropology has no restrictions, far more relationships, and manages them just fine.

(gossip over for the day. I still don't understand why my disgruntled grad student source of rumors, who had dreams of publishing a book of sarcastic caricatures of many of the department's best known professors present and past, kept asking me why I didn't plan to attend English grad school. Insufficiently neurotic?)

Reader Brett Bellmore weighs in on the subway/automobile divide:

I don't think it's so much a question of who you're compelled to associate with, as it is the simple issue of the extent to which you rely on government in your day to day life. Here out in the country, scarcely at all. Our water comes from wells, our sewage is dealt with by septic fields, trash collected by private companies, your neighbor plows the road, police are less of an issue because we're all armed to the teeth... We scarcely interact with government at all, except for schools and (infrequent) road maintainance. And we're aware that those services don't HAVE to be provided by government.

While the residents of our cities aren't quite that independent of government, it trends in the same direction.

On the other hand, you get into a city that's densely enough populated that a subway system isn't blatant insanity, and everybody is dependent on government almost moment to moment. They get to thinking that this is
some natural state of man, rather than a consequence of living in a highly artificial enviroment. It warps their thinking.

I defer to Robertson Davies in The Rebel Angels on the matter of professor-student sex:

"I have something to make up to Miss Theotoky. I've wronged her, gravely."

"How?"

"Took advantage of her."

"Pinched some of her good work? That sounds like McVarish more than you, Clem."

"No, no; something even more personal. I--I've had carnal knowledge of her."

"Oh, for God's sake! You sound like the Old Testament. You mean you've screwed her?"

"That is a distasteful expression."

"I know, but how many tasteful expressions are there? I can't say you've lain with her; maybe you didn't. I can't say you've had her, because she is still clearly in full possession of herself. 'Had intercourse with her' sounds like a police-court-- or do they still say that 'intimacy occurred'? What really happened?"

"It was last April--"

"A month crammed with incident, apparently."

"Shut up and don't be facetious. Simon, can't you see how serious this is for me? I've behaved very wrongly. The relationship between master and pupil is a special one, a responsible one-- you could say, a sacred one."

Professor-student relationships are special indeed, and like any relationship which is deeply rooted in the power of one over another, they should skip the sex. Doctor-patient, adult-child, president-intern, and professor-student power structures should wave a red flag to potential sex partners as a classic bad idea, and I find no problem with private universities enforcing ethical codes prohibiting these types of relationships.

But, as you can see from the good confessor's response, it's an overstatement to say that this professor "took advantage of," or "had" this student as she "is in full possession of herself" as many people in sexual relationships that have a power component are. Yes, it is possible to have sex with a professor without being coerced and public universities should by no means ban consensual sex outright.

However, a professor or anyone on the power end of one of these relationships should be required to walk a thin line. Ethical codes of any university should have provisions that if there are complaints from lovers/harassees, the professor faces consequences. This would hopefully not interfere with those truly consensual instances (unless a jilted lover decides to seek revenge in a nasty way-- but even then, a professor should be aware of this possibility and swim at his own risk) and would serve to deter and punish those professors with more sordid, coercive agenda.

A group of students and I spoke about this with a professor once and he was of the opinion that undergrads are strictly off-limits and sex with grad students is more acceptable, but professor beware! Although the undergrad-grad line is a somewhat arbitrary distinction, it might be a good guideline for professors to follow if they just can't stay away from students (which is what I recommend).

In class, especially my first classes with a professor, I prefer him to call me Miss and I to call him Dr. I have no problem with friendship that develops between professors and students. Some of my greatest experiences in college were the results of friendships with professors. But move beyond friendship, and that's a recipe for disaster.

For organdie and seersucker are pretty thin materials, and the only person in the world I ever danced decently with was Anne Stanton and the nights were warm, and I wasn't so much taller than Anne that I could not inhale the full scent of her hair while our music-locked limbs paced out the pattern of our hypnosis and our breathing kept time together, till, after a while, I would pass from an acute awareness of body to a sense of being damned near disembodied, of floating as light as a feather or as light as a big empty-headed balloon held captive to the ground by a single thread, and waiting for a puff of breeze.

Robert Penn Warren: All the King’s Men

"Yes the winters are bad, but the students are friendly."

But the article has made me wonder whether a little more action isn't in order. This wouldn't be action of the current zero-tolerance or grudging-tolerance variety, but rather some actual harm reduction. I like the idea of having workshops (as the author suggests) on "10 Signs That Your Professor Is Sleeping With You To Assuage Mid-Life Depression and Will Dump You Shortly Afterward." or, "Will Hooking Up With a Prof Really Make You Feel Smarter: Pros and Cons."

Of course, these workshops would probably be totally worthless and tell nobody who was willing to listen anything they didn't know already, but the simple existence of workshops with these titles would at least remind students to ask those questions to themselves, and remind them that alternatives exist to puritanism and libertinism.

In fact, forget the workshops themselves. Why not just advertise them everywhere with flyers, then cancel them at the last minute, to get the meme going?

It's my un-scientific observation that whenever the famously-even-toned Eugene Volokh starts out a post with something sort of informal, like "Yup," that he's about to turn out something fairly snarky.

His recent post mocking Clayton Cramer (an ex-Volokh Conspirator) is one particularly great example (and a great post).

I got 80% on the quiz that Will mentioned earlier:

You are a dedicated weblogger. You post frequently because you enjoy weblogging a lot, yet you still manage to have a social life. You're the best kind of weblogger. Way to go!

(Yes, that last line was a Mario Kart 64 reference.)

Anthony Rickey has recently learned that he has inadvertently been violating the Operating Agreement for Amazon's Associates program (which this blog also uses), and will therefore be switching to Barnes and Noble. Now I've always ordered my books online from Amazon, for reasons that I can now no longer remember. Hence, when setting up the blog, Amazon's program was the natural choice.

I too am tempted to switch, but not because of Amazon's evil contract. Rather, Barnes and Noble now offers free same-day delivery on orders of $25 or more sent to a Manhattan address. Of course, all of this is academic since I'm currently too poor to buy new books. Thank Heavens for libraries.

A good friend sends along a link to this from today's New York Times:

After years of untold subway time - spent watching, listening, reading - I would say that large, active systems of mass transit are the main difference between the red and the blue states of the 2000 electoral map (California excepted). People who travel only by private car - most of America - can too easily stick to their own kind and cling to their prejudices and misconceptions without the threat of contradictory experiences.

NYTimes By ROBERTA SMITH

Ode to the Manhattan:
Crave its bourbon-brunette hues, subtle vermouth-enhanced viscosity, and the lustful cherry treasure buried deep in the conic crux of the glass. Note how the bartender prepares the drink: is it shaken until beads of cold sweat fall from the tumbler, or is the ice barely introduced to the booze? When properly mixed with extra bitters and quality Italian vermouth (Carpano, the hard-to-find favorite), a tantalizing slick of Manhattan rapture and fading bubbles flows to the lips. Bypass house labels in favor of premium bourbon, and you'll soon share an experienced martini drinker's penchant for brand loyalty and intermittent experimentation.

from The Modern Gentleman: A guide to essential manners, savvy, and vice

Via Dan Drezner I see this quiz to determine whether I'm a blogaholic. I figure if he's balanced, I can't be much worse, so I take it, getting an 84/100. I am worse.

You're definitely a blogaholic. You dedicate most of your time to weblogging that you forget to have a social life. There's still life outside Bloggerville, you know. Try to go out more, 'kay?

I am shocked, shocked, that a personal experience with cancer could change someone's mind about medical marijuana:

MILWAUKEE -- State Rep. Gregg Underheim's fight against prostate cancer got him thinking about whether those suffering from cancer should be allowed to use marijuana to cope with the pain.

The Oshkosh Republican has decided to go against his party's leadership and introduce a bill that would let doctors prescribe marijuana for medical reasons.

The decision represents a major shift in philosophy for a legislator who was quoted in High Times magazine in the late 1990s opposing the legalization of marijuana.

(I'm not a supporter of the legalization movement (at least not without severe penalties for smoking and driving), but I'm a fervent supporter of medical marijuana.)

A reader sends along a link to this parody, though I haven't decided yet whether I find it alarming or clever. (To get the full effect you'll need to have your sound on).

Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown. . .

Toby, I imagine that Chicago's paying more attention to the CTA's fare hike as they try to wean us off disposable transit cards than they are to winning the title of most murders (login gapers/gapers). The Chicago Police Department has reorganized its gang intelligence units. Perhaps that will help. Hopefully there's some way to be more effective, for the rate did drop for the last half of the year after that switch-up.

While posting over at my own site, I discovered Sign That You've Been Doing Some Sort of Legal Writing For At Least A Week Straight #438 ("STYBDSSLWFALAW #438"):

After an off-the-cuff post,* my first instinct was to review it to make sure no footnotes were needed. I think I need one of those people that deprograms cult members.

*Readers of my blog and/or folks that have not bothered to ignore my writing in this space know that I don't really ever make any "on-the-cuff" posts.

[PS - STYBDSSLWFALAW #439 occurs when you start internally referencing your own conversations. E.g., "As I explained in our discussion of the New Hampshire Primary, supra 5:00pm Tuesday, Howard Dean may not be able to carry Pennsylvania."]

It gives me great pride to guest-blog with Crescat's fine bloggers based in Chicago.

And what pride they must have in Chicago, which regained its rightful place as the murder capital of America.

Something clearly needs to be done. For the sake of Chicagoans, I hope that something comes sooner rather than later.

If you used to read Tim Sandefur's great blog Freespace and then stopped when he switched to an unreadable color scheme-- great news. Due to "bitching" by some certain bloggers, Freespace is actually readable again!

If you like both jazz and classical music, then you really need to buy, or listen to Jacques Laussier's renditions of Beethoven's seventh. Even if you only like jazz or classical, you really ought to listen to it-- Beethoven writes a catchy tune and Laussier can make it catch. In fact, if you like neither jazz nor classical, maybe this will be the thing to coax you out of your libertine ways. (And, yes, if you buy it through this link, we will receive some small sum of money).

At the moment I'm sitting in my room blogging from my laptop as my visiting co-blogger, Amy, sits less than three feet away blogging from hers. Given that our laptops are almost identical-looking, it's a funny scene. If I could figure out how to take a picture of it, I'd send it to Dell.

to make less of a grimace when drinking bad coffee.

I don't like adding anything sweet to my coffee and only add milk if I need to cool it down so I can drink it fast, so I'm left with the full flavor of whatever I'd rather not taste. This could be difficult, since it eliminates most coffee on campus. All four of my classes are packed into Tuesdays and Thursdays. At least, Prof. Drezner's course is second thing in the morning, one of the times when I'm most alert. The afternoons will be tricky, though.

A public health roundup for the new year:
Dealing with dying
Progress in Alzheimer's
Snuffed out
and my personal favorite*
Pesky public health practitioners

*Though I have a strong interest in health (and even public health despite the protests of my classmates), I object heartily to the social-engineering motivations and methods Torrance so aptly points out in this article. I recommend it if you aren't yet convinced of how sinister well-meaning people can be when they want to subordinate personal freedom to public health objectives.

Also, though I advocate fat taxes, I don't desire them to in any way make purchasing fatty foods prohibitive (like cigarrette taxes currently do). I think that the regular sales tax on fatty foods (where there is a tax) should be apportioned to health care expenditures as people who disproportionately eat these foods account for huge health care expenditures.

Lawrence Solum calls us "intelligent and wide-ranging". I, at least, am incredibly flattered as Solum's is one of my favorite blogs. It may not be as wide-ranging, but it makes up for that with its great intelligence.

Popcorn, you will be relieved to know, is now the official snack food of the state of Illinois.

The same article also notes that a new law requires ATM-manufacturers to set up ATM's so that you can enter in your PIN number backwards to summon the police (if, presumably, some mugger marches you and your ATM card to the nearest ATM). The article doesn't note what will happen to anybody whose PIN number is palindromic.

Will's entry reminds me of an encounter I had with a wasp last summer. It was particularly aggressive and I'm particularly allergic. I always write eulogies for departed creatures in my life so here is the Elegy for the Wasp.

Mine aggressor hath succumbed on battlefield this day. The event should give me reason to shout hip hip hooray, As I lived in constant fear of trespassing wasp little For its deadly sting would send me to the hospital.

But it's with heavy heart I say goodbye to the beast,
The insect whom I sprayed and then its little life ceased.
Were its demands any different than mine?
To live free in the world and to roam with its kind?

To be trapped in this house, that is not what it wanted
And I trapped with it, we were mutually haunted.
'Tis a sad fact of war, one of us had to go.
And it was my chemical weaponry that ended the show.

An acetylcholinesterase inhibitor bathed my enemy,
Vanquished, he was done.
The war has finally ended and it is I who has won.

The bookcases in the various houses he lived in were always crammed full, and the bedrooms and hallways were turned into narrow passes between steep cliffs of books and mountains of errant documents that proliferated as he passed and pursued him without mercy in their quest for archival peace. He never was able to read all the books he owned. When he moved to another city he left them in the care of his most trustworthy friends, although he never heard anything about them again, and his life of fighting obliged him to leave behind a trail of books and papers stretching over four hundred leagues from Bolivia to Venezuela.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez; The General in His Labyrinth

I woke up this morning to discover a wasp in my shirt pocket. After a brief chat, we agreed to go our separate ways. Like ladybugs, they're ubiquitous in certain parts around here.
[From Ada:]

An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothaches, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occcurring at the same time formed a "tower," or if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture...

Her plump, stickily glistening lips smiled.

(When I kiss you here, he said to her years later, I always remember that blue morning on the balcony when you were eating a tartine au miel; so much better in French.)

The classical beauty of clover honey, smooth, pale, translucent, freely flowing from the spoon and soaking my love's bread and butter in liquid brass. The crumb steeped in nectar.

"Real thing?" he asked.

"Tower," she answered.

And the wasp.

The wasp was investigating her plate. Its body was throbbing.

"We shall try to eat one later," she observed, "but it must be gorged to taste good. Of course, it can't sting your tongue. No animal will touch a person's tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he always leaves the man's tongue lying like that in the desert" (making a negligent gesture)...

"All right. And the third Real Thing?"

...Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Softly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun.

Happy New Year's Day.

I'm sure the great minds at Vice Squad know more about this than I do, but I noticed a sign when I stopped at the grocery store yesterday, warning us that it was illegal to sell alcohol in Indiana on New Year's Day, so we ought to stock up before midnight.

What purpose does this law even putatively serve? Is the idea to keep people from going on 8 AM drinking benders on January First? To encourage them to lay in extra provisions in case they do feel the need to keep drinking?

Just one set of poker odds to report this morning. A-7 of Hearts are a definite favorite (60/40) against an unsuited King-Ten. Nonetheless, luck rewarded my irrational love of the K-T and my choice to go all-in with it.

(repeated often as a player mucks his pre-flop hand): "Just because they're high doesn't mean they're good!"

Like Snow, by Robert Graves:

She, then, like snow in a dark night,

Fell secretly. And the world waked

With dazzling of the drowsy eye,

So that some muttered 'Too much light'

And drew the curtains close.

Like snow, warmer than fingers feared,

Though to soil friendly;

Holding the histories of the night

In yet unmelted tracks.

O ME! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

All of this talk of college essays made me realize that I hadn't yet looked this year at the famously bizarre University of Chicago college essay questions (no small part of the reason I applied to and attended Chicago). In case you haven't either, here they are:

Essay Option 1

“One of the very nicest things about life,” as Luciano Pavarotti once said, “is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” Pavarotti, in all of his well-fed wisdom, suggests that eating and meals are a separate kind of activity—often a break from the work and play of life. Yet food and meals sustain our lives in many ways every day. Tell us about an ordinary food or meal that may seem mundane to the rest of the world but holds special meaning for you. Think about how the food is prepared, packaged, or served and by whom. Do you eat it in a distinctive manner? At a special time? In a certain place or with select company? Most importantly, explain how this everyday food sustains or satisfies you in a way that another food or meal could not.

Inspired by Sameera Kumar, a graduate of Huntington High School, Huntington, WV

Essay Option 2

If you could balance on a tightrope, over what landscape would you walk? (No net.)

Inspired by Emma Ross, a graduate of West Windsor–Plainsboro High School North, Plainsboro, NJ

Essay Option 3

In his autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela writes, “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” Tell us about an unchanging place to which you have returned. In what way has the place never changed? How does its constancy reveal changes in you?

Inspired by Anna Zawadzka, a graduate of Curie Metropolitan High School, Chicago, IL

Essay Option 4

Albert Einstein once said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Propose your own original theory to explain one of the sixteen mysteries below. Your theory does not need to be testable or even probable; however, it should provide some laws, principles, and/or causes to explain the facts, phenomena, or existence of one of these mysteries. You can make your theory artistic, scientific, conspiracy-driven, quantum, fanciful, or otherwise ingenious—but be sure it is your own and gives us an impression of how you think about the world.

Love; Crop Circles; Time Travel; Numbers; Non-Dairy Creamer; The Platypus; Language; Mona Lisa’s Smile; Sleep and Dreams; The Beginning of Everything; The End of Everything; The College Rankings in U.S. News & World Report; Gray; Art; The Roanoke Colony; Consciousness

Inspired by Akash Goel, a graduate of Saint Bede Academy, Peru, IL

Essay Option 5

Take as a model the students who inspired Options 1-4 as you pose and respond to an uncommon prompt of your own. If your prompt is original and thoughtful, then you should have little trouble writing a great essay. Draw on your best qualities as a writer, thinker, visionary, social critic, sage, sensible woman or man, citizen of the world, or future citizen of the University of Chicago; take a little risk and have fun.

I think I'm in love with this commercial.

In 1958, Justice Tom Clark was scheduled to participate in the annual convention of the American Bar Association. Several other justices decided to attend as the association's guests. One of those was Justice Hugo Black, who frequently criticized the ABA's political leanings.

When Justice Felix Frankfurter (who wasn't a big fan of Black's, to say the least) found out about Black's plans, he wrote a note to his buddy Justice John Marshall Harlan (the then-living one; Frankfurter wasn't known to send notes to justices that were not alive):

I almost puked when I heard Hugo say that if it would be good for the Court, he'll go. Gosh! For nearly twenty years I have heard his uniform condemnation of the A.B.A. and his contempt for their views. And now, he puts on that noble act.*

*Quoted in Tinsley E. Yarbrough, John Marshall Harlan: Great Dissenter of the Warren Court 129 (OUP 1992).

PS - I can't resist quoting a classic Deep Thought (by Jack Handey): "Laurie got offended that I used the word "puke." But to me, that's what her dinner tasted like."

I often wonder what induces people to send their relationship problems to Miss Manners rather than, say, Dear Abby. Take, for example, this latest column. Here's an excerpt of Miss M's reply:

Miss Manners will not insult your intelligence by claiming that this problem is solvable. An expectant mother who violates the terms of an arrangement already open to heaven-knows-what is not going to be reformed by a quip. Nor will we argue about whether your bad feeling stems from the presumed deed or the use of subterfuge to accomplish it; fortunately, that is out of Miss Manners's purview. The etiquette question is whether you can insult the perpetrator so as to shame her but not alienate her.

Probably not. Nobody is willing to suffer being called a liar -- least of all liars. The indignation they are able to bring to such accusations is stunning.

I recently finished reading A. D. Nuttall's book Dead from the Waist Down, a fascinating book that I highly recommend to anyone who has pretentions towards being a scholar. The main body of the book is essentially a case study of three scholars and their sex lives (or such details thereof as he can reconstruct from a sketchy historical record). However the final chapter tackles the larger question of the worthwhileness of the enterprise of scholarship. I strongly suggest reading the entire argument, but a representative quotation is below.

Even if we admit that scholars do not form a completely closed society--in this differing from say philosophers, who really do spend most of their time wrestling with problems which would not have appeared but for other philosophers--grant, I say, that the effects of scholarly activity permeate the larger intellectual world, is this intellectual world so important? Grant the force of the good manners argument--is the spectacle of so many greybeards bowing and smiling to each other in the middle fo a world of pain so very admirable? Granted that the meticulous procedures of scholarship have a certain ethical status within the group, what if the group activity is itself only a kind of expensive sport, singularly lacking in spectator interest? The scholars annotate and review and meanwhile babies die and are born.

Waddling Thunder is probably one of the best food-bloggers out there, and his latest post on risotto is definitely a good read. But as a long-time lover and cook of risotto, I'm a little confused by his suggestion that you add the sauteed mushrooms and peas at the end of the rice's cooking rather than earlier on. Personally, I like to put them in before the stock, so they leak their flavor throughout the rice. But Waddling Thunder might want to put them in at the end in order to have more dishes to wash.

[Incidentally, there's no need to re-fry refrigerated risotto patties the next day. Leftover risotto is best eaten cold straight from the tupperware, and if you live alone, the fork is optional.]

UPDATE: Incidentally, today's New York Times also carries this Mark Bittman column on Jook, which he bills as "Chinese risotto, though infinitely less pretentious," and suggests as a hangover cure.

Susan B. offers the following words of wisdom to some of us unenlightened libertine souls:

Woe to those who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter.

I'm currently blogging from a Scrabble game (she takes a while) with my darling co-blogger Amy Lamboley (&*%!-- I just drew three Es to make my final rack AEEEGOV) and it's pretty even going into the final stretch. I have a slight edge, but "V" has been good to me, despite her reputation. ["Vims" on a triple letter score along with "Jihads" for a 48 point stroke.]

UPDATE: Heidi Bond suspects foul play:

There's no way to get 48 points from the word. He had to be adding an "S" to jihads, or he'd have got no points from it at all. So this means that from VIMS he gets (4+1+3+1)*3 = 27, and from JIHADS (8+1+4+1+2+1) = 18. This is a total of 45 points. Now he can get the extra 3 from multi-letter scores, but you see why this makes it impossible--if he had a double letter score on the "S" in VIMS he'd get an extra one point times 3 from VIMS and an extra 1 point from JIHADS, for 49. And he can't possibly both reach the triple word score and get a double letter score on anything else. So my guess is they forgot to double the "S" for "JIHADS". If you lost by a point, Will, take it back!

Heidi Bond writes:

Me: I can't believe I missed that one problem on the calculus test.
Him: Oh.
Me: I'm so stupid. . . .
Him (after long pause): Well, at least you're pretty.

Tim Sandefur, responding to this post by my dear colleague, quotes Abraham Lincoln quoting Judge Douglas's paraphrase:

The white people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, but they are not good enough to govern a few miserable negroes!!

A gentleman speaking to his girlfriend (on her second bottle of Alsace Gewurztraminer) on the phone as she sits with a male companion says, "Tell him to keep his hands off of you."

Query: Why does he not tell her to keep her hands to herself?

To my delight, a friend's wedding registry includes this. And I strongly suspect that it isn't intended for future offspring. Should I ever take the plunge, dare I hope for this instead of wire whisks and serving bowls?

Harry: You take someone to the airport, its clearly the beginning of the relationship. That’s why I have never taken anyone to the airport at the beginning of a relationship.

Sally: Why?

Harry: Because eventually things move on and you don't take someone to the airport and I never wanted anyone to say to me, 'How come you never take me to the airport anymore?'

Heading to exciting places today and also to the airport, for an exciting reunion with one of my long-lost co-bloggers. If my own posting is light until this evening, you'll know why.

If you haven't already, go read Julian Sanchez's 20 Questions interview.

For some people, linking has become a very, very useful form of blogging.

For me, it's a great way to hurry up a post at 3am central time.

So, let's link on everyone's favorite topic, Faith-Based Prisons!

At this link, Volokh Conspirator (and CS 20 questions interviewee) Randy Barnett links to several law professors discussing the issue that the Crescat Gang (myself included) has debated ad nauseum with the good folks at Southern Appeal.

The law professors' discussion(s) seem to be much more normatively-focused than the CS-SA repartee. Rawls is featured prominently.*

*If I ever get a pet snake (likelihood: zero), I'm gonna name it "Rawls." Good snake name.

A sign you've had enough tastings --

when the family is sitting around, trying out champagnes (the sister who is getting married wants to serve some at her reception, but she knows little about them), and that sister and I get into a conversation about our dislike of manatees. I am the most passionate in proclaiming I will weep no tears if they become extinct. The groom-to-be looks increasingly more disturbed. Ah, if it could all be this, and not talk of various shades of pastels for dresses.

It's a little later in the day than I meant to post this, but here it is-- another installment in our occasionally sputtering 20 Questions series.

This week, in what might be our best 20 Questions ever, Julian Sanchez (also of Hit and Run) discusses the Libertarian movement, John Lott, the relationship between fiction and politics, and whether debaters make better lovers.

1: What made you decide to start blogging? (UPDATE: The link below is fixed...).

As a birthday present, I'd registered a domain & made a website for my then-debate partner Amy Phillips: 50minutehour.net And a few months later, she turned it into a weblog. (It's still active, and quite good, incidentally.) That was the first I'd seen of the form, and it struck me as a cool idea. I'd tried to keep a journal off-and-on again for a couple of years, but invariably I'd make entries for a while and then let months pass without writing in it. I've always found it's easier to motivate myself to write when I'm writing for other people, so I thought the blog form might kick my ass to get more writing done.

2: You maintain two blogging presences, writing both at www.juliansanchez.com and Reason's Hit and Run. Do you find it exhausting to be in two places at once? Presumably Reason mandates your presence on their blog, so why do you maintain your other blog?

As people who still check up on my blog have probably noticed, the volume certainly has dropped off since I moved to Reason. And that's partly because a lot of the shorter political items I might've blogged on my own site are going to H&R, while potential longer ones get turned into articles. So it's also changed the character of the posts to some extent: There's still some longer, rambly philosophical stuff that wouldn't really be appropriate for an H&R posts or an article. There's also more personal stuff on my own site now. Not *too* personal; I'm fairly private, and have never felt as comfortable as some bloggers going into detail there. But there's certainly plenty of things I'm interested in--and interested in writing about--that the average Reason reader probably doesn't much care about (some band I'm newly into or what have you), so it's nice to have an outlet for that.

3: Like a few other bloggers, you have what looks like a really fun job in political journalism. How did you get this gig and what advice do you have for those who'd like to follow in your footsteps?

It's a little hard to offer advice, because the job sort of dropped out of the blue--I'm still periodically astonished at my good fortune on that front. I had written a piece for Reason on the distributed journalism and the John Lott/Mary Rosh story, which I'd had a part in uncovering. And I know some of the Reason staffers read my blog. So when Sara Rimensnyder left her assistant editor spot to work in the wacky world of film, I guess my name was bandied about, and I got a call one day from Nick Gillespie asking if I wanted to submit a resume. That was it.

I suppose that if you're trying to catch an editor's eye with your weblog one thing that helps is to do original reporting and investigating. Pick a story you don't think is getting enough attention and then actually start making phone calls. The Lott story was the first time as a blogger that it occured to me to dust off those old Reporting 101 chops and see if I could confirm the story being circulated. I assume that this is something they want to know that you can do, in addition to churning out opinions, and I think the Lott story was one of the reasons my name ended up getting tossed around when they were looking for someone.

4: Which is Reason more oriented toward-- Free Minds or Free Markets? What about yourself?

Well, the pat libertarian answer, of course, is that the two aren't really separable, and I do believe that. The PRI in Mexico, for instance, seldom had to resort to explicit censorship. They were a huge source of newspaper ad revenue, and controlled a lot of the relevant unions and the ink and newsprint prices, so it was just clear to publishers that staying afloat required toeing the line. But since that's sort of a cop-out answer: My own interests probably lie more in the "free minds" direction, and at least since the "cultural turn" the magazine took a few years ago, I think the same is true of Reason. There was an editors note in the magazine's 35th Anniversary issue explaining some of the rationale for the shift. Partly it's that so much of the economic battle has been won. The range of serious debate isn't from Milton Friedman to Mao Tse Tung anymore. It's maybe Milton Friedman to Bob Kuttner, and I'm pushing it with Kuttner--he's probably a good deal more "fringe" than Friedman. The other, less frequently stated, is that dammit you can only stomach so many pieces on the virtues of private trash collection before you want to put your head through a wall. There's never a shortage of new economically stupid policies and proposals to take shots at, but the basic arguments are familiar to anyone who's interested in public policy, often vary only slightly from issue to issue, and are in most cases recapitulations of something Hayek said 50 years ago... or Adam Smith 200. Culture, on the other hand, is something libertarians have oddly neglected (maybe with the exception of folks like Tyler Cowen and Jim Twitchell), when you consider the obvious applicability of someone like Hayek's insights in that domain. Even much of what Foucault did could be wielded to interesting effect by a libertarian. So there's more genuinely new ground to cover there.

From a strategic standpoint, it's worth noting that while Marxism is pretty well dead, or at least moribund, in a lot of politics departments, it's still vibrant in English and comparative lit departments. That's the kind of branching out I think it's valuable to do, because the political influence of artists and writers is at least as great as those of people who churn out punditry... probably much greater.

On a personal level, obviously, I'm a writer who studied philosophy, so while I feel I've got a decent understanding of economics as non-economists go, mostly picked up from living with an econ Ph.D. for a for a couple of years, that's just not my comparative advantage or my central interest. If it were... I'd have studied economics.

5: Which judges and congressmen (if any!) do you most admire?

Perhaps as a political journalist I shouldn't admit this, but I tend to be pretty bored by political personalities, as opposed to public policy. Politicians? I guess, predictably, I think Ron "Dr. No" Paul's a mensch, though the curse of principle is that he doesn't get to do the kind of horse-trading that makes for legislative influence. On the basis of my brief encounters with her during the campaign to stop the D.C. smoking ban, district councilwoman Carol Schwartz has her head on straight. Among judges I dig your man Posner, Ginsburg from the DC Circuit Court, Alex Kozinski, maybe Clarence Thomas on his good days, and, of course, Judge Dredd.

6: How should governments balance property rights against freedom of speech and thought when dealing with intellectual property?

I usually take the view that "intellectual property" shouldn't be thought of as quite the same as physical property, but rather as a propertylike mechanism for providing a public good. I mention this because even as I see a strong justification for IP, I'm wary of rhetoric that claims that, say, downloading music or movies is "just like" shoplifting. If you own a car or a coat or something, it's generally yours in perpetuity, and we don't want to subject those sorts of claims to a strongly instrumentalist calculus. The trick is to always keep your eyes on that "progress of science and the useful arts." As folks like Lessig have argued pretty ably, cultural and scientific revolution rely as much on free borrowing and recombination as on the incentives generated by IP rights. With respect to copyright, we're pretty clearly past the point of diminishing returns. Take the extreme cases folks like Lessig cite, where a documentary filmmaker can't use footage with a few seconds of a Simpsons episode in the background without risking a lawsuit. There's just no plausible incentive effect there; it's a pure limitation on speech without a compensating benefit. What I like is the notion Lessig et. al. proposed during the Eldred case, which is to give some teeth to the IP "quid pro quo," for which there was at least some limited precedent. That is, the presumption should be in favor of free speech, and the burden--maybe a weak burden, but a burden nonetheless--should be on the government and copyright holders to make a plausible argument that any extension in either the scope or the term of copyright is justified by an incentive benefit powerful enough to justify the marginal curtailment of speech. Automatic deferral to the legislature yields what we see now, where the costs of overly-rigid copyright rules are dispersed across unorganized consumers, and the benefits concentrated on industry players with powerful lobbying groups prepared to apply as much pressure as necessary to keep Mickey in bondage for another 30 years.

7: What should be the effect of Dean's "reregulation" campaign on the "Libertarians for Dean"?

I groaned pretty hard at that myself. Unlike some of his other awful ideas, it's something that the executive might have some genuine unilateral control over, through agency appointments, so it's certainly cause for greater concern. I'm hoping that a lot of this is the kind of primary-season playing to the left base that'll fall by the wayside in the general election, but maybe that's just wishful thinking. At the least, it makes it harder to walk into the voting booth with any kind of enthusiasm either way. But some of the arguments I made in the "pro Dean" piece I did for Reason remain--the ones about divided government and the value of signalling a willingness to coalition-jump. They'd apply to any Dem candidate, really--it just looks as though that's going to be Dean.

All that said, I don't think I could bring myself to actually vote for Dean at this point. I don't know that he'd be worse than Bush on net, but I'm not convinced he'd be better. So I suppose I get to preserve my perfect record of electoral abstention for another four years.

8: Is there any chance we could form "Libertarians for Lieberman"?

Well, I don't know how much chance there is for Lieberman, period, so maybe that's moot. But I know folks who seem to think he's the least-bad of the bunch, notably Arnold Kling. He seems better than Dean and some of the others on trade and a few other issues... and even if he's going along with our new "You lookin' at me, punk?" foreign policy, it's hard to imagine he'd be as bad as Bush in the driver's seat. On the other hand, he's got that culture war bollocks, which might resurface in the general election if he got the nod, as well as that unfortunate tendency to inject his religion into his politics. But at this point, as with Dean, it wouldn't be a question of "Libertarians for" as it would Libertarians against Bush. As I said, I don't think I can get energized enough to vote for anyone this time around.

9: Some proto-libertarians, like John Stuart Mill, liked to distinguish between the use of drugs and other substances in public and in private. Smoking bans, public intoxication ordinances and the like spring from this idea. To what extent should public drug use be regulated differently from private drug use?

Well, one important part of that is deciding what's "public." I have no real sympathy with smoking bans because I don't consider someone's bar a "public" place; it's a private place that's open to the public, which is different. You have to choose to go in, and presumably you can tell in advance whether you're going to be subject to smoke if you are. The basis for treating genuinely public places differently would, I imagine, be that while it's OK to say that a condition of going into some bar is that you've got to consent to expose yourself to the potential harms of secondhand smoke (if that's the rule the owner wants), that shouldn't be a condition of just leaving your house to walk down the street. And I suppose I'm sympathetic to that. If you've got asthma and the bar down the street is too smoky... well, find a place that's less smoky. But that's not a reasonable demand if we're talking about the DMV instead of a bar.

Libertarians often have trouble with handling risk, because, pretty much by definition, merely "risky" behavior might not eventuate in a rights violation. And some folks just take the hard line that you never allow prior restraint, you just have compensation and punishment after the fact, and hope that this serves as a deterrent. I don't find that terribly palatable, so in principle I'm open to the idea if there's clear showing of a risk. If, for instance, the evidence indicated that people on PCP or something would be far more likely to start fights with strangers on the street, say, I could be convinced that we need a "no PCP in public" rule.

Tangentially related: one of the few forms of drug regulation I think might be reasonable is maintaining the requirement of a prescription for antibiotics. If people are popping azithromycin every time they get a sniffle, you risk breeding more drug-resistant germs, which is a different form of potential "public" harm.

10: Is it lonely working in D.C. without being affiliated with the Democrats or the Republicans?

Not really. There are a lot of overlapping social circles in D.C. beyond just the party-based ones. There are plenty of libertarians or libertarian sympathsizers, some of whom are working for Republicans on the Hill--lots of them meet up once or twice a month for drinks and roundtables through a group called the America's Future Foundation. And there are policy geeks and journalists and bloggers who hang out--many folks wearing more than one hat, of course.

11: What's your favorite under-rated D.C. hangout?

That's tricky, because I'm not sure how people outside my circle of friends generally rate places. I'm partial to the Raven, a Mt. Pleasant dive that looks unremarkable, but has a very pleasant, friendly vibe to it. But I'll be moving to the U-Street area pretty soon, so I'll probably be spending more time at the Kingpin, which is a cozy late-night place that has a kind of Barbarella retro-futuristic lounge decor and some very good DJs. I'll count it as "underrated" just because I never seem to have trouble finding a seat if I get there before, say, 1am, and it's a small joint. I'm also happy that the new house is within walking distance of Sparky's Cafe, a cozy little place with free WiFi. I've been dying for a regular coffeeshop hangout since I left Manhattan, where I practically lived at a place called Esperanto while I was working on my senior thesis. Tryst in Adams Morgan was a bit too big and trendy to make a proper substitute, but Sparky's looks like it'll fit the bill.

12: Who, in your mind, is the greatest living political philosopher?

You know, two years ago, the tough part of that question for me would've been deciding between Rawls and Nozick. Now it's figuring out who else I'd mention in the same breath as either of them. Maybe T.M. Scanlon at Harvard, or possibly Thomas Nagel at NYU. Among people I actually agree with (i.e. libertarians), it might be Loren Lomasky, whose excellent book "Persons, Rights and the Moral Community" was, sadly, out of print last I checked. My own view right now is a bit of a mash: A big helping of late (Political Liberalism era) Rawls spiced with a bit of Lomasky and David Gauthier. What I've read of David Schmidtz's stuff also looks promising, with a few qualifications, but I've just looked at a few of his papers so far, and I'd want to tackle a couple of his books before rendering a verdict.

13: You've written before about your eventual plans to return to school. Do you still plan to go on to graduate school, and if so, what do you want to do?

"Plan" is a terribly strong word to use in any sentence about my process of intention formation. I'd thought about applying this year, but decided I'd put it off until next fall if I do it at all. Though I suppose I'd better do it then if I'm going to do it; I don't want to be too far out of my 20s and still in school. My thinking had been to go for a philosophy doctorate. I occasionally toy with the idea of law school, but I have no desire to actually -practice- law, and I'm averse to becoming one more person who ends up at some soul-sucking 500 person firm to pay back his law school loans because he didn't know what else he wanted to do.

14: What publication do you most wish would start a blog?

My first instinct is to say the Economist, but I don't know whether their comparative advantage is something that would translate well to the blog form. Maybe The Atlantic Monthly? Actually, what I'd really like is for the folks at The New Republic to pay more serious attention to &c., attribute the posts, and generate more content for it, since at present it's typically one or two mini-essays per day, rather than a full-blown staff blog.

15: For those of us who have long given up trying to sort through all of the claims and counter-claims about John Lott, just tell us: is he a liar or not?

That depends on whether you count as a liar someone who's convinced himself that he's telling the truth: I think he may have. I guess there's no rock solid proof that he's lied, just some highly suspicious circumstantial evidence... let's just say that at this point, if I read him claiming that there are 60 seconds in a minute, I'd want to double-check it.

16: Do you think that internal argument over the War in Iraq damaged the Libertarian movement?

Well, I want to say that internal debate and conversation are good for any movement in the long term... but realistically, the answer is "yes". I think a lot of the libertarian organizations, from the party to the think tanks, are facing diminished financial support from hawks, if they opposed the war, or doves, if they supported it... though I think most of the organizations you'd typically think of as "libertarian" were opposed. The flip side is that there are plenty of people who opposed the war and found they could make common cause with people they would've dismissed as either loony or evil months earlier. TomPaine.com was linking Cato policy papers.

17: If you could completely eliminate the political power of any one American interest group, which one would it be?

Would "elected officials" count? If not, how about the elderly? Entitlement programs for old people--Social Security and Medicare--are far and away the biggest leech on the body politic at present, and as the CBO report released in December makes clear, it's just going to get worse. But these programs are still a sort of third rail because of the influence of groups like the AARP. In the long term, from a budgetary perspective, we're clearly screwed in a big way unless we develop the political will to start overhauling or eliminating these soon. There's also the fringe benefit that older Americans tend to be disproportionately bad on social issues. If you look at the recent polls on attitudes about gay marriage or private, consensual gay sex, attitudes are highly dependent on age. People our age tend to be fairly tolerant; you get above 60 and the overwhelming consensus is that "sodomy" should be illegal and marriage should be straights-only.

18: Do debaters make better writers? Better lovers?

Well, I'm dating an ex-debater now, so I think I have to say "yes" on the "better lover" question. As for better writers... well, not necessarily. If you mean "better than the population at large," obviously they probably are, if only since they tend to be smart people who are trained to spot bad arguments and try to make cogent ones. But I don't know that, for a given person, the experience of debate would necessarily improve your ability as a writer. It's a very specialized kind of quasi-performance art, and the characteristics that make a \strong debater don't map cleanly onto those that make a strong writer. Big components of success in debate are things like personal presence or being quick on your feet. Some of the skills you need to debate effectively could arguably be bad habits you'd need to overcome as a writer. A good debater can dodge a tricky question or a damaging point with a glib response, which doesn't fly as well on paper. Sometimes you have to be willing to make an argument you know couldn't stand serious scrutiny, but is rhetorically compelling, and will at least stand up for the 45 minutes you've got before the judge renders a decision. And there are plenty of debate tropes and rhetorical tics that would come off as highly stilted in writing if you're used to framing your arguments that way. If you see weird locutions in an ex-debaters blog, it'll often be something like that at work.

The one really useful habit that debate inculcates for a writer is that it forces you to make a serious effort to come up with the best arguments on both sides of any given issue. It hammers into you that for any argument, you've got to immediately think: "Ok, what's the opp to that going to be?" Partly because you may, in fact, have to defend the other side, and partly because you have to anticipate every possible argument the other team might make and be ready with a response when \they make it. And it's important to do that in writing, because you won't always have the luxury of clarifying later: If you don't show a skeptical or hostile reader that you've anticipated their objection, the easiest thing for them is to assume that you hadn't thought of it and wouldn't have a good reply.

19: What do you think should be the relationship between literature and politics?

Interesting that you ask that, because I've just been reading Richard Rorty's "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" with great interest, and he certainly sees literature and art as central to politics. Our most fundamental value commitments, what Rorty calls our "final vocabulary", are basically prerational. If deep down you don't share some critical mass of normative premises with someone, you're not going to be able to bring them around by "committing philosophy on them," as Nozick put it. \Sure, you need the familiar deductive tools of analytic philosphy and that sort of thing in order to agree on where the premises that you do share lead. But that base that successful deliberative politics needs, some minimum shared conception of human dignity or of a well ordered society, well... that's not the kind of thing you can argue somone into. You have to be able to present the vision in a way that people see its appeal, which is where art and literature come in.

Jerome Tuccile wrote a history of the libertarian movement called "It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand"-- which is accurate enough, since at least when they're first getting interested in libertarian ideas, a lot of people come through Rand. And the funny part is, while she paints herself as this great champion of rationality and logic, the actual philosophy, stripped from the fictional and rhetorical context, is mostly a lot of sophomoric crap. She's not successful because her arguments were any good, but because she effectively gets across a "transvaluation of all values." She paints this portrait of the world going to hell because of political power lust. And, more importantly, she provides this kind of shock-therapy, in that she undoes, at least briefly, a lot of the emotional associations that get drummed into us, and that implicitly shape our political views. Government programs to help people are "generous," and if you want to be good and generous, you support those. Commercial activity is avaricious, and nice people want to constrain the sway of this sphere where greed is the prime engine.

Nozick once told me that as he was coming to hold classical liberal views, there was a point where he was convinced that capitalism was the best system, but that he must be a bad person to think so. I don't think I'd want to adopt her set of emotional associations wholesale, but for a lot of people she helps to loosen a sort of emotional-intellectual straightjacket that makes it impossible to consider classical liberal ideas without associating them automatically with base motivations, or the opposite ideas with noble ones.

There's another role I see for literature, though, and probably the more important one. Rorty talks about "ironists" in politics, which is to say, people who are in some sense ambivalent about and aware of the contingency of their own "final vocabularies". He suggests that this is because, maybe through literature, the power and value of alternative, incompatible final vocabularies has been impressed upon them. As a Rawlsian libertarian, a big part of the appeal of a very "thin" public sphere for me is that the greater the role of government, the harder it is to avoid embedding one conception of the good or another in public policy. The ironist, as Rorty characterizes her, is in many ways ideally suited for the role of Rawls' reasonable citizen, in that she \acknowledges the existence of these incommensurable value sets--the monk and the bon vivant, to pick extreme cases--that are equally authoritative for those who hold them. When, through literature, we're able to feel the pull of these different, incompatible value sets, I think we become more reluctant to want to make one dominant in the public sphere. And we become more cognizant of how a more robust state necessarily starts bumping up against one or the other of these conceptions, how neutrality becomes more difficult. There's a great passage in the final section of Anarchy, State and Utopia, where Nozick's talking about the liberal society as a "framework for utopia," and he asks whether there's some one-best-society for "Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Yogi Berra, Allen Ginsburg, Harry Wolfson, Thoreau, Casey Stengel, The Lubavicher Rebbe, Picasso, Moses, Einstein, Hugh Heffner, Socrates, Henry Ford, Lenny Bruce ... you and your parents." The same point could've been made as well...or maybe better... citing fictional characters, because fiction helps us to enter the inner-lives of such radically different kinds of people.

20: Do you read fiction? What sort of fiction do you read?

Sure. I actually hadn't read much at all for a few years, and made a conscious effort a few months ago to get back in the habit of reading novels. I tend to like stuff that's mindbending or slightly surreal.

So, say: Pynchon, Marquez, Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K. Dick (wretched prose made tolerable by fascinating ideas), Nabokov (Pale Fire's my favorite so far), Italo Calvino. Hunter Thompson, if he counts as fiction. Tom Robbins can churn out some delicious sentences when he's not being excessively didactic. Also plenty of SciFi; folks like Jeff Noon, Iain M. Banks, Gibson, St