Cure-alls and Remedies
Every year the ACS does a round table on the Supreme Court’s decisions at the end of the term. They’ve posted the roundtable from this year online, so you can listen to some of the leading lights in constitutional law analyze the cases. Here’s a direct link to the audio video . Here’s a page…
There’s likely little doubt at this point , but I just wanted to point out that Peak Oil is mainstream consensus at this point. Buisnessweek has an article about Charles Maxwell , “the No. 1 analyst in his field [energy],” saying that “he now foresees unprecedented stress on the world economy as peak oil production…
Doing a little dance today over the decision in Boumediene and Al Odah v. US. It turns out that Congress didn’t accidentally suspend habeas corpus while authorizing the use of military force. Yay! More here , and the decision can be read here . Also, here’s a line that I really, really enjoyed: “Abstaining from…
Working in the Arendt archives this week, I came across this draft of a letter of Hannah Arendt’s, responding the poet Auden’s essay on Falstaff and his criticisms of certain aspects of her account of forgiveness in The Human Condition: Dear Wystan Auden – I just read the Falstaff piece — had some trouble getting…
We’ve arrived in our new home, and things are settling down. On our first night here, our car was broken into it, and it’s taken a bit of time to get internet running smoothly, but I’m finally ready to start blogging more regularly. DC is a wonderful, wonderful town: I love the Mall and the…
I’m currently in the process of writing wedding vows with my fiancé, Antoinette. I’ve been casting about everywhere for inspiration and influences, to the extent that Antoinette has accused me of treating the vows like an academic paper. She’s right, of course:erotic love is one of the original philosophical themes, and the prospect of making…
My partner graduates from law school this week, and I’m reminded of Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher, counseling one of his Bard students to go to law school: “I decided to study law,” one of his students later recalled, “and came to him to ask advice. ‘I think our society is headed for calamitous events,’ I…
I’m watching this Elizabeth Warren video today: The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class . Synopsis after the jump. 1. Though household incomes have increased over the last thirty-five years, median incomes for males have actually dropped by $800. (Women make less still.) Household incomes have only increased because both partners are working. 2. Household…
There’s a great piece in the Boston Globe on the relationship between the African slave trade and current global inequalities: Shackled to the Past . One thing that’s always irritated me about broadly materialist historical explanations is the tendency to miss the importance of contingent historical events. Geography is not destiny, as Jared Diamond suggests…
Many academics know about the great book by Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White . However, I think it’s not common knowledge outside of academics who specialize in race that he’s been involved in two journals, Race Traitor and The New Abolitionist , both focusing on undoing white privilege by abolishing whiteness . This…