radosh's blog

I was well into adulthood before I ever read any coverage of the Supreme Court that wasn't written by Linda Greenhouse, so I was always under the impression that the Court was inherently boring. Dahlia Lithwick changed my mind with reporting like this:

What if the drugs had been found closer to the driver, rather than in the back seat, asks Sandra Day O'Connor. Could all three passengers still be arrested? Yes, says Bair, because the car is a common area. What if the drugs were found in the trunk, asks Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Well, says Bair, if there were a "large quantity of drugs in the trunk, or a dead body in the trunk ... "; Ginsburg reminds him that this is her hypo and there is just a Ziploc bag in the trunk, not a dead body.

Then it's O'Connor's turn with the innocent-grandma hypo: "What if it's a high-crime area and some mother gets a ride from her son and doesn't know he's involved with drugs?" Can she be arrested? "Supposing it's the middle of the day," she adds. "And she's going to the grocery store?" Bair can't quite make himself say "Lock the old drug-mom up." So he mumbles something about a "totality of the circumstances test."

Justice John Paul Stevens has a hypo, too. What if there were four passengers in the car instead of three? No different says Bair. "What if there were six?" asks Stevens. Same. Stevens, undaunted: "What if it's a minivan and there are eight people?" he asks. Lock 'em up. Stevens takes a breather while Ginsburg takes over: "What if it had been a bus?"

The other day I called Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe a book that will change the way you look at the world. That's a description I save for a small handful works. (The Nova adaptation, by the way, is fun but necessarily short on actual science, which is the mind-blowing stuff.) Guns, Germs and Steel is another, and so are Visual Explanations and Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte.

Tufte's latest is an essay on PowerPoint, and I guess somehow he became aware that I did my own little PowerPoint satire, because the other day, out of the blue, I get an inscribed copy of his PowerPoint booklet in the mail.

Seriously, how fucking cool is that?

7:29 PM

Going through my clipping file for the year while working on the Esquire Dubious Achievement Awards, I came across this mid-May quote from Gen. Lloyd Austin in Baghdad in The New York Times.: "I think we have good control, but we may need to police up some meatheads."

Ah, memories.

12:38 PM

Gregg Easterbrook -- Wait! It's a new subject, I swear! -- is back with another appalling display of ignorance. "Physicists rather casually speak of ten unobservable dimensions, in addition to the obvious three, existing in our own reality, all around us," he writes. So, why, he asks, is the idea of an unseen divinity so preposterous? "If at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or top schools, you proposed that there exists just one unobservable dimension--the plane of the spirit--and that it is real despite our inability to sense it directly, you'd be laughed out of the room. Or conversation would grind to a halt to avoid offending your irrational religious superstitions. To modern thought, one extra spiritual dimension is a preposterous idea, while the notion that there are incredible numbers of extra physical dimensions gives no pause. Yet which idea sounds more implausible--one unseen dimension or billions of them?"

First of all, I hang out with a lot of folks who don't believe in a deity, and quite a few who fervently do. And I've never heard either group laugh at the other, or avert their gaze in embarrassment. Like many culture warriors on both sides Easterbrook has a bit of a martyrdom complex, asserting a hostility to religion that isn't remotely as commonplace as he'd like to believe.

"I am an economist. Can it really be that I know more about Afghan politics than the secretary of defence?" A worrisome tidbit about the Rumsfeld Memo that didn't make the news. (via Brad DeLong

7:49 PM

Goddamn you people, don't you know I'm broke?

5:29 PM

Everyone's a critic.

1:12 PM

Gregg Easterbrook has a good blog -- for me to poop on!

5:57 PM

From Frank Answers: Which is worse, Britney Spears or a black howler monkey?

"I recently had the misfortune of sitting through most of the Britney Spears movie Crossroads, and about halfway through it i began to feel an intense and disturbing urge to vacate my bowels involuntarily. The last time i felt such an overwhelming urge was at the Black Howler Monkey exhibit of the San Francisco Zoo. Naturally i'm wondering if there's any connection, and if so, which is more dangerous to our freedom as God Loving Americans: the continued existence of Britney Spears or the continued existence of the Black Howler Monkey?"

"All I know about Britney Spears is that she seems to be the head of the trend for eleven-year-old girls to dress up like hos. For that, I think the parents are the ones in need of a smacking. I would be much more fearful of the sinister black howler monkey. His evil howl can be heard for miles, and will serve as an alarm to the other monkeys when we finally begin out strike against them.

"If you still have bowel problems, consult a doctor."

2:35 PM

To Stars, Writing Books Looks Like Child's Play. The surest sign that someone underestimates an art form is that they think they can do it themselves. People who would never try to tackle a novel, or "even" a chapter book, don't think twice about banging out a book for little kids, which is, in some ways, one of the most difficult types of books to write well (unless you're currently in taking an English Lit class, your grandchildren will probably not read any of the adult fiction you read this year -- the next generation will have equally good novels of their own. They will, however, read most of the books you read as a young child, because truly good children's books are a much more rare event).

Similarly, it's always shocking to me that people who would never sing outside of the shower, much less write their own tunes, think nothing of attempting to rap in public. At least no one's buying their CDs. If only the same were true of celeb kid-lit.

12:27 PM