Author Archive | Jacob Levy

Chris Bertram reports that Stuart Hampshire has died, and will link to obituaries as they become available.

Eugene lists some possible responses to the Court’s dismissal of Newdow on standing grounds. My own reaction isn’t on the list, though: “Well, at least they didn’t affirm ‘Under God’ on the merits, thereby creating a lousy precedent that we’d be stuck with.” I was never especially otpimistic thst Newdow would win (though I thought […]

Soon I leave for the airport, and thence to Amsterdam; and,if KLM functions more efficiently this time than it did on the way here, thence to Chicago in very short order. A few days on the ground, followed by Salt Lake City,followed by…no travel. Idouble checked my Palm Pilot to be sure of this when […]

On serious jetlag and KLM-induced annoyance, but enjoying the conference on religion and constitutionalism that brings me here. I hope to have a few hours to go to Berlin (for the first time) on Saturday before I leave; seems appropriate for the day after Reagan´s funeral. Looks like there´s lots of blogstuff I should be […]

I’ll be on the road almost continuously until 6/22 (Charlottesville, Postdam, Salt Lake City), and don’t anticipate blogging much or at all between now and then; e-mail will also go almost-entirely unread. One note on e-mail I’ve been getting: several people have written to confirm that “bobo” has been internalized as a French word over […]

(See UPDATE below.) Quoth Kevin Drum: everyone who looks seriously at federal spending for more than a few minutes knows perfectly well that the vast majority of spending goes to four things: Social Security, Medicare, national defense, and interest payments. Unless you propose large cuts in those programs, you just aren’t serious about “small government.” […]

Rachel Smolkin of the American Journalism Review– a very sharp writer and an old friend from college journalism days– has a new story in the AJR on “The Expanding Blogosphere,” in large part about the nexus between bloggers and the political press and accordingly concentrating on the pro/ semipro world of bloggers and blogs currently […]

“Bobo” appears to getting incorporated into French. The Le Monde reporter does feel the need to define the term once, but doesn’t use scare quotes, treat it as a foreign word, or mention David Brooks. The people quoted use it freely. Curiously, we get a detour into the English word “gentrification,” “which can be translated […]

to colleagues and bloggers Jim Leitzel and Michael Green for winning Quantrell teaching awards from the University of Chicago.

from Frida Ghitis at TNR. She draws attention to a set of problems that are related to but not quite the same as the ones I noted a couple of days ago. I emphasized the organization’s institutional stance that no system of government is preferable to any other, that human rights abuses just kind of […]

Dan Drezner’s New Republic column is up, and it’s a good one. If (as Dan thinks, and I agree with him) the neocons were basically right about the value, importance, and stakes of a democratizing reform project in the Middle East starting with Iraq, the administration’s almost-willful incompetence at that project is that much more […]

Chris Bertram says Amnesty International’s annual report for 2004 is now out. A sobering reminder of how bad things are out there. It is also a reminder of how bad things are in world of chatterers, op-ed columnists and bloggers that we can expect (a) a great deal of moaning about how Amnesty has failed […]

Just a couple of weeks ago, in response to this post about the booze, hookup, and daddy’s AmEx-driven culture of Washington interns, I commented that my Hill internship sure didn’t seem to resemble that; neither did my subsequent summer residential fellowship. (I was out at IHS. Our semi-sister program, the Koch Fellowship, was rumored to […]

So I was poking around the Chronicle’s annual survey of endowments. I got to the table (on p. B6 in the print edition) listing endowments and operating budgets. And it occured to me to have a look at one as a share of the other, without yet having any clear sense of what would be […]

In this article about the potential Libertarian threat to Bush’s re-election effort (via Hit & Run) we see the following: A senior adviser to the campaign, who did no want his name used so he could speak more frankly, said there was no concern in the campaign. “None, none,” the adviser emphasized. “[Mr. Bush is] […]