Author Archive | Jacob Levy

The New Hampshire primary always shifts me out of scholarly political-scientist mode and into political-news-junkie mode. And when I say ‘always’ I mean ‘always.’ I remember uninformed arguments on Portsmouth playgrounds during the 1980 campaign, when I was eight. By the time of the ’84 Hart-Mondale race I was fully a part of the culture: […]

Michael Crowley’s (subscription-only) TNR article about Massachusetts Democrats having no real enthusiasm for Kerry is, as far as I can tell, spot-on. The same goes for a lot of New Hampshire Democrats I know. Having grown up in the part of New Hampshire that’s part of the Boston media market, I can report: Kerry does […]

Inklings of good news on both the election front and the Oscar front. Lieberman passes Clark and Edwards in NH poll. Return of the King picks up every Golden Globe it was nominated for, including best picture (drama) and best director (drama). UPDATE: Yes, I do realize that the stupid “Joe” puns, one of which […]

Throwing out all norms of either scholarly reliance on data or journalistic ethics, I’m going to confirm Ryan Lizza’s impression of Edwards’ NH strength by relying on my mother, a NH Democrat and Edwards volunteer. She was a pretty diehard Clintonophile (always talking about how charismatic and electrifying he is in person; NH voters have […]

My favorite sentence from this utterly delightful John Holbo essay on literary studies, good and bad writing, theory, and the MLA: Doubts about the correctness of the paper’s conclusions do not fall within the scope of the paper, as it were. Damn. I wish I’d written that. UPDATE: I got to the end, noticed the […]

David Edelstein, in his review of Win a Date With Tad Hamilton:The gimmick of Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!, directed by Robert Luketic from a script by Victor Levin, is that the movie star’s bacchanalian lifestyle is on the verge of derailing his career, so his agent (Nathan Lane) and manager (Sean Hayes)—both named […]

According to CNN, Clark, meanwhile, took a few minutes to bag groceries at a Goffstown supermarket Thursday. Cashier Carolyn Creeden said the former NATO supreme commander was “pretty good at it,” despite dropping a woman’s bag of cookies during a discussion of the new Joint Strike Fighter. UPDATE: David Plotz’s piece is also dead-on. Every […]

Michael Green gives a pretty good sense of what it’s like. If you’re nearby and able to venture out of doors, however, you might want to come by this conference on constitutionalism in Israel and Palestine. Speakers range from distinguished North American academics such as Gordon Wood and Charles Taylor to supreme/ constitutional court justices […]

Princeton’s Provost, and my graduate school advisor, the political theorist Amy Gutmann, has been selected the next President of Penn.

to Is that Legal? the blog from our sometime guest-blogger (and my fellow Brown alum) Eric Muller.

Quoth D-squared: I hereby question the “left” credentials, and indeed the commitment to democracy, of anyone who takes the government side against Katharine Gun. Saddam’s gone and nothing can bring him back. Whatever happens in Iraq, happens. The war was fought and cannot be unfought. All that turns on this case, is whether someone who […]

No time to go into detail, but getting a correction up has urgency: I appear to have misstated the procedures for selecting MP candidates in the UK, Australia, and Canada (single-member FPP parliamentary systems) a couple of days ago, by understating the importance of local party member selection and overstating the influence of the central […]

Harry Brighouse writes: As the primaries creep up on us (in the US), I want to make a point against the primary system that seems obvious to me but I’ve not heard made elsewhere. It is simply this: it constitutes an unwarranted violation of the principle of freedom of association. The States which have primaries […]

See Tyler’s post below, Lawrence Solum, and Tyler’s Marginal Revolution post. Would immortals-by-lifespan who were not invulnerable be very, or infinitely, risk averse? Would they be very unambitious and inactive, since there would always be time for stuff later? I’m not going to get into the genuine intellectual issues at stake, just going to enjoy […]

A year and a week ago, I said the following. With the Democratic presidential field almost complete, I offer my first NH primary prediction, 55 weeks in advance. Richard “Eyebrowless Man” Gephardt, who utterly failed to connect with NH voters in 1988, will utterly fail to do so again in 2004. Protectionism, unionism, and midwestern […]