Author Archive | Jacob Levy

(See here, and Eugene’s post here) …I think every blogger whose work I read every day is either a professor, a current student, or pro- or semi-pro in one way or another. (I’m counting professional writers like Virginia Postrel as ‘pros,’ as well as people who blog for a magazine like Matthew Yglesias, Kevin, and […]

A while back I criticized the changes in the personnel of the bioethics commission. Over at TCS, Paul Seaton registers his disagreement. Elsewhere, Justin Katz tries to set me straight (so to speak) about the conflict of interest that should prevent newly-married lesbian journalists from covering the gay marriage story (I think he thinks I’m […]

My New Republic column is online. It’s become fashionable to bash Iraq’s provisional constitution in the last week, and everyone from The Washington Post’s editors to TNR’s own Spencer Ackerman has gotten in on the act. Critics have charged that the constitution devolves too much power to local authorities and creates a central government too […]

This wise and judicious post should do. Predictability is good in a watch, bad in a blogger. If you already know what I think about an issue before reading what I have to say, why bother reading it? And why should I bother writing it? (That’s part of the reason I link to only a […]

The San Francisco Chronicle has decided that two women who got married can no longer cover “the same-sex-marriage story.” I saw this via Tim Graham at the Corner, who headlines the post “lesbian media ethics and rolls his eyes about ‘liberal hand-wringing’ but doesn’t indicate whether he thinks there’s a genuine conflict of interest here […]

I’m more than a little disturbed by the widespread blogging to the effect that the Spanish election results represent a great victory of al-Qaeda, that they show that European countries can successfully be blackmailed by terrorism, etc. It’s particularly grating to see such commentary from Americans who, collectively, had had much less experience with terrorism […]

to Russell Arben Fox, who commemorates the day with this very funny post.

Wow. this sounds awful– truly, epically awful. A Tim-Robbins-scripted play about the war in “Gomorrah” in which characters named”Woof” and “Pearly WHite” walk around saying “Heil Leo Strauss!”– with a projection of Strauss’ face on the screen, no less. Robbins is a brilliant actor and a first-rate director. Even when he’s scratched his propaganda itch […]

Susan Moller Okin has died. Stanford has now released its obituary. UPDATE: I’ll write more here as I’m able. For now I’ll note that the tributes to Okin are likely to (rightly) emphasize her best-known and most influential work, Justice, Gender, and the Family. But Okin’s subsequent fame as a normative liberal feminist shouldn’t obscure […]

A county attorney in Oregon– a state without a mini-Defense of Marriage Act and with a state-level prohibition against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation– has expressed his judgement that it is unconstitutional to restrict marriage licenses to opposite-sex couples, and his county has accordingly begun issuing marriage licenses to gay couples. This might […]

The classy John Derbyshire strikes again. Eugene has configured the Volokh Conpiracy so that readers can view posts only by selected authors. I’d love to see the Corner do so, so that I could read Ponnuru, Goldberg, Adler, Barnett, etc without getting interrupted with this stuff…

The new worm going around poses as authentic e-mail much more persuasively than most of its predecessors. (And it seems to be doing clever things like harvesting all the e-mail addresses off a single webpage and sending spoofed e-mails posing as one person on the page to all the others. I’m getting it over and […]

A few people have taken my post yesterday on the bioethics commission to be fanning the flames of Straussophobia. Such was certainly not my intent. I’m not a student of Strauss directly or indirectly, but I have both very fine colleagues and very fine students who are, and I have certainly learned important intellectual lessons […]

Continuing the ‘it’s time to speak honestly abouy Nader’s whole career’ moment: Jonathan Chait.

I’m entirely delighted, of course– though I did oddly badly in the prediction pool at our Oscar party but not picking LotR every time. (I figured that a spread-the-wealth impulse would take hold among voters who were committed to giving LotR the top two prizes, and so I didn’t, for example, pick ‘Into the West’ […]