June 4th, 2009

summer reading list

Summer sci-fi and mystery paperbacks! Gin-and-tonic reading!

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Interesting Items for 6/4/2009

  • It puts the lotion on its skin [mightygodking.com]

  • Most comics fans don’t like Veronica, believing her to be a stuck-up mean bitch. And this is true. Veronica is a stuck-up mean bitch. But here are some truths about Veronica most people don’t want to realize: 1.) She is rich. This counts for a lot. 2.) She is unpredictable and fun. 3.) She doesn’t care much what other people think of her. 4.) She is rich, yo. 5.) Most importantly, she is not Betty Cooper.
  • “The Young Cons believe the Bible is relatively silent on issues relating to supply-side economics.” [edgeofthewest.wordpress.com]

  • They’re not talking about coalitional politics here—the necessity of compromising with constiuency X despite their outlandish positions on Y in order to get disappointed by someone new—they’re claiming as their authentic identity the ideological incoherence of political coalitions. They haven’t put the cart before the horse so much as glued the horse to its side and demanded it be pulled down the mountain; then later, as they sift through the gore and gristle that had been…

June 3rd, 2009

Interesting Items for 6/3/2009

  • Secret Origin of Klarion the Witch Boy? [crookedtimber.org]
  • How and why Sonia Sotomayor’s parents are not immigrants. [edgeofthewest.wordpress.com]

  • The map below shows, to a considerable extent, why Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It appeared in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s essay, “The Strategic Features of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea,” from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for October, 1897—just a little more than a year before Spain ceded the island to the United States. As you can see Puerto Rico straddled one of the routes to the as-yet-unbuilt canal through the as-yet-nonexistent…

June 2nd, 2009

Interesting Items for 6/2/2009

  • Personhood [ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com]

  • The anti-abortion fight relies on people with voices speaking for the presumably voiceless. The anti-slavery fight relies, first and foremost, on the enslaved asserting their own freedom. The works and arguments of abolition don’t mean much if the blacks, themselves, don’t believe in their personhood.

June 1st, 2009

Interesting Items for 6/1/2009

  • Is Candor From Judges Dead? [balkin.blogspot.com]

  • Tamanaha: David is puzzled (below) at my previous post suggesting that judicial candor will be a casualty if Sotomayor’s nomination is derailed by her statements that judges occasionally make choices which are influenced by their backgrounds. Candor cannot be a casualty, he says, because it is already dead. “Most scholars and commentators” agree that “candor has not been a positive characteristic for Supreme Court nominees for quite some time,” according to David…
  • US CODE: Title 18,248. Freedom of access to clinic entrances [law.cornell.edu]


  • TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 13 > § 248
    § 248. Freedom of access to clinic entrances
    (a) Prohibited Activities.— Whoever—
    (1)by force or threat of force or by physical obstruction, intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with or attempts to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person because that person is or has been, or in order to intimidate such person or any other person or any class of persons from, obtaining or providing reproductive health services;
    (2)by force or…
  • The death of Wolf Block [busmovie.typepad.com]

  • A pretty good analysis, but the lesson is muddled. Although the article begins with the idea that WB didn’t have to die, in the end it says “there’s no reason to be shocked” by the death. That’s correct. Because the firm “doesn’t own anything” there’s nothing to tie it together but mutual faith — which might get you an afterlife, but not save a law firm.

    Although the death of this particular firm may not…

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