Archive | June, 2004

I’m also pleased to report that Glen Whitman and Neal Whitman, who usually blog at Agoraphilia, will be guest-blogging here from Wednesday to Friday. Glen is a good friend of mine, a solid libertarian (much more so than I am), and an economics professor at Cal State Northridge. Neal is a Ph.D. in linguistics, and, […]

I’m delighted to say that Cass Sunstein will be guest-blogging here for the next few days, posting occasionally about his new book, The Second Bill of Rights. Cass, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, is one of the most influential law professors in the country (and is in fact the […]

In the last weeks, there has been a ton of attention to the so-called Greatest Generation and to the spirit of those who fought World War II – and to some apparent parallels between that generation and our own. During the opening of the new memorial in Washington, President Bush drew particular attention to that […]

Radley Balko over at Liberty & Power loves HBO’s Deadwood as much as I do. Like him, I thought the season finale was superb. Here is a portion of Radley’s post: The show bustles with themes of rugged individualism, and explores the troubles and travails of a small community emerging from Hobbesian anarchy into a […]

The Federalist Society/Wall Street Journal book ranking the presidents via a survey of liberal and conservative scholars is doing quite well on Amazon.com. Too bad, then, that this survey, while far more balanced than most, ranks Warren Harding at the bottom. Forever tarred by the Teapot Dome scandal (though it’s not clear he was complicit […]

Dan Gifford passes this along; it was apparently transcribed by a listener, purportedly from the June 18, 2004 Late Show with David Letterman. Don’t know if it’s true, and I won’t assume that it is. (UPDATE, 6/28/04: It is indeed apparently not true. Rats!) But it’s at least a good joke: David Letterman: How do […]

As I mentioned in my posts yesterday (here and here), my criticisms of Judge Calabresi’s remarks were premised on the remarks’ having been accurately quoted and paraphrased. All I have to go on is the New York Sun article, and there’s always the risk that the article is in error. It seems that tne source […]

In the passage sent to Eugene by a reader, Mark Kingwell misquotes Cary Grant as saying: “Every man wants to look like Cary Grant. I want to look like Cary Grant.” Grant is actually reputed to have said, “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.” I think the actual […]

Today is the 35th anniversary of the infamous Cuyahoga River fire in Cleveland — one of the seminal events in the history of environmental law. Oil and debris apparently accumulated under a railroad trestle and briefly caught fire. News of the “burning river” spread across the nation, helping to galvanize the emergent environmental movement. After […]

Historian David Beito has been blogging about Blacks’ reaction to the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act. Editorials in the nation’s leading Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, were generally hostile to the Act, which exacerbated unemployment among African Americans. When I did my own research on the Act, I looked at more “official” African American […]

Almost every reference to the Al Aksa Martyrs’ Brigade in the mainstream media has been accompanied by caveats that the while the group is an offshoot of Fatah, the main Palestinian party run by Arafat, the group acts autonomously and neither Arafat nor the PA have any control over it. However, PA prime minister Qurei […]

who was recently Undersecretary of Defense. Among his assertions in the interview: (1) Israel is squandering an opportunity to withdraw from the territories while it has a very friendly president in office; (2) the situation in Iraq is far better than most people think; and (3)claims that a cabal of Jewish neoconservatives are running American […]

Professor Bainbridge has a puzzle about the two — you wouldn’t think they’d go together, but apparently they do. I read all the Jeeves books, and many other Wodehouse books, and liked them very much; but I confess I have no idea what the answer is.

A google search for Gay Eugene, it turns out, yields the Volokh Conspiracy as the #1 result. I learned this from a friend of Sasha’s (who goes by Inspired Turnip), who did the search because she was looking for “a gay business directory” “to find a man with a flair for interior decorating to help […]

In response to the Men and Sexy thread, a reader passed along this amusing excerpt from Mark Kingwell’s Catch and Release (I express no opinion on the merits of the quote; I just think it’s well put): Manly elegance is obviously a hard standard to reach, and en route we are likely to go astray. […]