Snow... and a hippie song.

It snowed last night:



Silvio wants to drive out into the country:



Playing on the stereo, "Triad" (sung by David Crosby, not Grace Slick):

I want to know how it will be
Me and her or you and me
You both stand there with your long hair flowing
Your eyes alive, your minds are still growing
Saying to me what can we do now that we
Both love you -- I love you too
I don't really see, why can't we go on as three
You are afraid, embarrased too, no one has ever
Said such a thing to you
Your mother's ghost stands at you shoulder
A face like ice a little bit colder
Saying to you
You can not do that it breaks all the rules
You learned in school
I don't really see, why can't we go on as three
We love each other it's plain to see
There's just one answer comes to me
Sister lovers -- water brothers
And in time maybe others
So you see what we can do
If we try something new - if you're crazy too
I don't really see, why can't we go on as three

Remember that? I love the way he's overflowing with love yet still manages to say "face like ice a little bit colder." The whole world is transforming, except the part where men hate their mother-in-law. Anyway, great classic song expressing the deluded idea, which seemed true at the time, that if we just stopped listening to the uptight squares -- with their rules, man -- we could find infinite pleasure.

Whales, parrots... we can't resist.

Speaking of Technorati charts and bloggers' attractions to cute animal stories, remember Ziggy the Parrot? I jumped at that one. I wasn't alone:

Posts that contain Parrot per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Lots of major media went for it too. Today, the NYT regrets falling for the cute, adding this correction:

Although the article reported that the information had been obtained from reports in The Daily Telegraph and other British newspapers, The Times could not verify the former couple's accounts because the information was given to the British press by a freelance journalist who charged for the account. The Times does not pay for information. The Times should have disclosed fully to readers why we relied on other news reports. Or, perhaps it would have been prudent, given that condition, for The Times to have resisted parroting the episode at all.

Hmmm... so people are selling the cute animal stories the web is so hungry for? I'm going to hold cute animal stories up to fiction standards from now on -- not because I think they are all made up, but because there are too many of them, we're too into them, they are the junk food of the web, and they aren't really that good. If some short story writer had come up with the Ziggy the Parrot story, you'd immediately see it for the dreck it is.

And let me take some credit: I did refuse to blog the whale story yesterday. It was like pushing away a piece of cake to start a diet.

The tire-slashing case deflates.

There was a plea bargain in the Milwaukee tire-slashing case:

After a two-week felony trial culminating with notes from a conflicted jury, four Kerry-Edwards campaign workers - including the sons of U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and former Acting Mayor Marvin Pratt - had their charges in the Election Day 2004 tire-slashing reduced to misdemeanors and accepted the deal....

If they pay a collective $5,317.45 restitution by their April 26 sentencing, Assistant District Attorney David Feiss will recommend all four get probation. Misdemeanor property damage carries a possible maximum penalty of nine months in jail and a $10,000 fine.

The sudden plea offer came at 2 p.m., after the jury - which had been deliberating since Thursday afternoon - sent a note that "people that are adamant about their decision and are not budging."

The American Mind reacts and collects the reactions of other bloggers. They don't seem too happy.

Here's Jessica McBride:

Election fraud cases can be extremely difficult to prove. In the case of the tire slashings, the state by necessity had to rely on the testimony of out-of-state operatives who allegedly hadn't all been entirely cooperative on the front end. The prosecution was probably justifiably worried about potential outright acquittals of all, and decided it was better to convict the defendants of something, than nothing. It's hard to argue with that.

But the frustrating thing is that McCann's office has been notoriously ineffective in prosecuting election violations overall, and the vast majority of the allegations in Wisconsin have been lodged in his jurisdiction and ended up not prosecuted or under-played....

In an extremely open election system like ours (same-day registration and no photo ID requirement), it's important to have aggressive, tough prosecution of election-law violations so that there's SOME deterrent against people doing it.

Rick Eisenberg says:

Judge Brennan was absolutely correct in observing that six hours is not a long time to deliberate after a seven day trial and undeniably right in telling them to continue. It really is hard to avoid at least the suspicion that the DA's office saw this as an opportunity to bail on what it saw as a no-win situation. I don't see how it is a reasonable compromise by a prosecutor who wants a conviction. Why, after devoting just about all the resources that you are going to have to devote, would you, essentially, let the defendants go at the first small sign that you might not win?

"'Don't think so hard,' Kenji Yoshino's mother once said to him in Japanese. 'Life is not that simple.'"

That's the first line of a book review I wrote for Sunday's NYT Book Review.

But Yoshino has spent his life thinking very hard, as if the problems of sexual orientation and racial identity that have troubled him so much really were amenable to answers.

The book is "Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights." Read the whole review. Read the book too. It's good!

MORE: The NYT also has a nice, long excerpt from the book. An excerpt from the excerpt:

I don't teach classes on gay rights any more. I suspect many of my students now experience me as a homosexual professional rather than as a professional homosexual, if they think of me in such terms at all. But I don't experience myself as covering. I've just moved on to other interests, in the way scholars do. So the same behavior - not teaching gay rights - has changed in meaning over time.

This just brings home to me that the only right I have wanted with any consistency is the freedom to be who I am. I'll be the first to admit that I owe much of that freedom to group-based equality movements, like the gay rights movement. But it is now time for us as a nation to shift the emphasis away from equality and toward liberty in our debates about identity politics. Only through such freedom can we live our lives as works in progress, which is to say, as the complex, changeful and contradictory creatures that we are.

(For an explanation of what "covering" is, see the review.)

Trying to read blog charts.

What inferences can you make from blogging patterns? For example, look at this chart for blogging about Samuel Alito:

I see confirmation. If the nomination were running into trouble, the discussions would have kept up. Right?

Okay, that was an easy one. Let's look at films. Here's "Brokeback Mountain":

The recent spike is the Golden Globes. But I'm impressed by the overall building of the discussion.

Compare "Capote":

Again, there's that Golden Globes spike, but maybe there's a slight increase in the level over time.

Let's try to read how the domestic surveillance issue is affecting politics. It's harder to think of what search term to use, but I'm going with "NSA":

Well? What can you say? Bloggers react to news, but bloggers react to a certain type of news story. You know what the biggest story yesterday was, don't you? This. The 42-page Department of Justice legal analysis of the NSA program can't compare to a whale swimming in the Thames.

Posts that contain Whale per day for the last 30 days:

Actually, I'm surprised at how well the whale does on a non-Thames-swimming day.

So what do you think? Is there any future in reading blog charts?

"Kind of a nasty problem for an audiobook: where do the footnotes go?"

Says David Foster Wallace at the beginning of his reading of "Consider the Lobster" (which I've been listening to). The NYT has an article today about the footnotes-and-audiobooks problem. In "Lobster," the problem is solved by putting a filter on Wallace's voice when he's reading the footnote. I think it would be saner to just have him say "footnote" and then "back to the text." Or better yet, skip the footnotes if you're writing the sort of thing they make audiobooks out of.

At his public readings, Mr. Wallace either skips footnotes, reads them as if they were in the main text or - the "worst option," he said in a telephone interview- brackets them by saying "begin footnote" and "end footnote."

"I spend a very long time trying to get the writing to hang together grammatically on the page more than for a sweating, breathing person to read to an audience," Mr. Wallace said from his home in Claremont, Calif., his voice sounding oddly footnote-ish. "Most poetry is written to ride on the breath, and getting to hear the poet read it is kind of a revelation and makes the poetry more alive. But with certain literary narrative writers like me, we want the writing to sound like a brain voice, like the sound of the voice inside of the head, and the brain voice is faster, is absent any breath, and it holds together grammatically rather than sonically."

So single-minded is Mr. Wallace, who is 43, about how his work looks over how it sounds that at his first public reading in the late 1980's, "I inserted the punctuation," he recalled, adding: "I would read a clause and say 'comma' or 'semicolon.' Or I'd say, 'new paragraph' and 'indent.' Now looking back at it I can see what a silent deal this is for me." At one point in "Consider the Lobster," Mr. Wallace encounters an ellipsis and reads "dot, dot, dot," which producers say is verboten. "Part of it is I'm not an actor and I don't know how to trail off, and I become somewhat autistic about it," he said.

A brain voice? Do you have a brain voice? That should be an easy question to answer, but I can't answer it. I think I only have a sense of a "brain voice" when I'm thinking about speaking, which is the opposite of what Wallace is talking about.

"I become somewhat autistic about it" -- I'm not too sure what that means either! You mean he's not consciously being sort of funny when he says "dot, dot, dot"? He's just bizarrely overfocused on his own text?

Anyway, despite the seeming lack of similarity by between my mind and Wallace's, I'm greatly enjoying "Lobster," which I've got in my iPod.

Speaking of autism, the article also discusses the audio book of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," a novel with an autistic boy as the first-person narrator. I've listened to this one too. This one isn't read by the author -- Mark Haddon -- but by an excellent reader named Jeff Woodman. Here, the book has all sorts of drawings and diagrams, and the text has had to be reconfigured a bit so you can understand it without the graphics. This makes me likely to buy the book too.

I must add that even when the book lacks any distinctive visual elements, the experience of seeing the text is different enough that I find that when I like an audio book, I want to see the text too.

"Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World."

I enjoyed this NPR interview with Albert Brooks about his new movie, in which a character, played by him and named Albert Brooks, is sent to India and Pakistan to try to learn what makes Muslims laugh and write a 500 page report about it, which, Fred Thompson tells him, would be doing his country a great service. Well, that's the concept. Yes, of course, it doesn't make any sense. He's just one comedian, and the Muslims in question are millions of people, many of whom don't speak English. I wouldn't even expect Albert Brooks to be able to figure out what Americans find funny. But none of that matters much, I assume. The question isn't what makes Muslims laugh, but whether Brooks can make us laugh with this material. That sounds like a rather difficult task.

How is he doing? Rotten Tomatoes is showing seriously mixed reviews. Here's J. Hoberman in the Village Voice:

[T]he movie is complicated by two paradoxes—one annoyingly obvious, the other fascinatingly implicit. The first is the use of India, which, although home to 150 million Muslims, has six times as many Hindus; the second is that Brooks's comic sensibility travels so badly. Woody Allen may bestride the world like a colossus, but—the brilliance of Real Life, Modern Romance, and Lost in America notwithstanding—not even the French have shown any interest in Albert Brooks. I'd hazard that this has something to do with the untranslatable subtlety of his one-liners (dependent as they are on situation and delivery) and the uningratiating nature of his persona (complete with refusal to acknowledge blatant neuroses).

"Not even the French have shown any interest in Albert Brooks" -- I love that.

"I have a moral right to my voice. It's like property - there's a fence around it, in a way."

Don't try to make any money imitating the distinctive voice of Tom Waits. He will pursue his legal remedies:

Sixteen years ago he won an influential case against Frito-Lay over a vocal sound-alike in a Doritos commercial, and he has pursued imitators ever since. Last Friday Mr. Waits was awarded damages in a case against the Audi division of Volkswagen for a commercial in Spain using music that was similar to his song "Innocent When You Dream," sung in a voice like his. Another lawsuit is pending in Germany against the Opel division of General Motors, this one for a version of the Brahms "Lullaby" performed in what he calls a suspiciously Waitsian voice.

"It does take a tremendous amount of time, energy and money" to pursue these cases, Mr. Waits said from his home in Northern California. "But in a way," he added, "you're building a road that other people will drive on. I have a moral right to my voice. It's like property - there's a fence around it, in a way."

At a time when musicians are increasingly open to licensing their music for advertising, television and other commercial uses, Mr. Waits has steadily built a reputation not only for refusing to license his music, but also for aggressively defending his style as a unique legal property.

"It's part of an artist's odyssey," he said, "discovering your own voice and struggling to find the combination of qualities that makes you unique. It's kind of like your face, your identity. Now I've got these unscrupulous doppelgängers out there - my evil twin who is undermining every move I make."...

In both cases, Mr. Waits said, the agencies had first approached him to perform and then, when he turned them down, hired imitators.

You'd think the companies have at least learned not to ask him first. Without that juicy nugget of evidence, I wonder if he can keep winning these things. I'm not an expert in this area of law. I just find it interesting. I'm trying to picture the trial. Are there experts who can testify about the elements of a gravelly voice and a doomed attitude?

Blogging as an alternative to law reviews -- and as a model for them.

Orin Kerr makes a point in this post that I've found myself saying a few times lately, that blogging can be good for legal scholarship. He's responding to Daniel Solove, who's complaining about how badly written law review articles are. They're too long and complicated, especially in proportion to the ideas they express.

I wrote a little article on this subject back in 1994 called "Who's to Blame for Law Reviews?" 70 Chi.-Kent. L. Rev. 81. I was disagreeing with people who blame the student editors, who, I said were mainly following the lead of lawprofs:

[L]aw review editors have a sense of what a Law Review Article is supposed to look like: a proper ratio of text to footnotes, a reassuring stolidity to the prose, a predictable structure studded with signposts that advertise the existence of that predictable structure, transition paragraphs before every paragraph that contains the approximation of a new idea, transition sentences before every sentence that ventures into the semblance of new territory, transition phrases parasiting on every sentence that might otherwise contain no reminder of what we have been discussing all along, confidence-inspiring, tiny elevated numbers appearing with the frequency of punctuation marks.

If you give these students your attempt at imitating the law review articles that have gone before, they will quite naturally undertake to help you succeed at what it appears you are trying to do - to produce a textual object that really looks like that article stereotype they have in their minds. Chances are they do not have a terrible lot of respect for the form either and they, too, ridicule its pomposity, its leaden seriousness, its circumspect proposals, and its compulsive footnoting. Yet, just as the author sought a job, tenure, a raise, or (for the more lofty-minded) reputation, the students have extrinsic goals in mind. It is their own future, and not the general advancement of legal literature, that tends to motivate law students to add the work of editing a law journal to their already heavy workload. If the law professor has not challenged the limitations of the genre, why would they?

When you see your article after their editing, you are going to be appalled at what they've done. It's going to come back insipidly neutral in tone, deadened into law reviewese. You hate it. Why did they do this to my prose?

Perhaps they have done it because your work seemed to be moving in that direction in the first place. You were writing what was in essence a parody, and they reacted by shifting into an even higher gear parody. It is a joint venture: what we do suggests to them that they ought to do what they do - even though when we see it we find it appalling. We are like the parents who are aghast when their children lash out at them with anger, sarcasm, or words meant to humiliate. Those parents resist perceiving that it is their own manner of speaking that the children have adopted. The children return their interpretation of the language and intonation they have heard. The parents are aghast because they are now on the receiving end. The children are showing them how it looks from the other side. The parent is not the victim but the teacher. Likewise, we, the law review writers, can fancy ourselves the victims of the students, but we are, most assuredly, the teachers.

Our displeasure with student editing should translate into critique of our own writing. The solution is not to complain about students, but to stop writing these parodies.

I really believed, back then, that the short essay form could take over. But in fact, law reviews got longer and longer and more and more unreadable. I'd have been sad if I had known that then, but I'd have been elated if I'd known that blogging would come into being.

Orin Kerr responds to Solove with:

Maybe the answer is more lawprof bloggers. Blogging pushes you to write clearly and simply; the format rewards clarity of expression more than traditional law review articles do.

That is so right. Blogging sharpens our taste in writing. It makes us impatient with circumlocution and pretentiousness. It makes us expect to see pithy ideas in every sentence.

And let's not resort to blaming law students. I don't think you need to escape into blogging because law reviews hold you back. As I said in 1994, the students learn from us. As we blog and demonstrate the value of concision and clearly expressed ideas, they are learning that it is legitimate to demand these writing values from the lawprofs whose work they publish. They are tipped off that it's okay to be fed up with windy professorial meanderings. Students can revise and restore their journals -- as I've got to think they want to do -- by infusing them with the good writing values blogging demonstrates.

Defending the NSA surveillance program.

The Department of Justice has a 42-page legal analysis of the much-criticized NSA surveillance program (PDF):

The [Authorization for Use of Military Force] places the President at the zenith of his powers in authorizing the NSA activities. Under the tripartite framework set forth by Justice Jackson in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 635-38 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring), Presidential authority is analyzed to determine whether the President is acting in accordance with congressional authorization (category I), whether he acts in the absence of a grant or denial of authority by Congress (category II), or whether he uses his own authority under the Constitution to take actions incompatible with congressional measures (category III). Because of the broad authorization provided in the AUMF, the President’s action here falls within category I of Justice Jackson’s framework. Accordingly, the President’s power in authorizing the NSA activities is at its height because he acted “pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress,” and his power “includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.” Id. at 635.

The NSA activities are consistent with the preexisting statutory framework generally applicable to the interception of communications in the United States—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”), as amended, 50 U.S.C. §§ 1801-1862 (2000 & Supp. II 2002), and relevant related provisions in chapter 119 of title 18.1 Although FISA generally requires judicial approval of electronic surveillance, FISA also contemplates that Congress may authorize such surveillance by a statute other than FISA. See 50 U.S.C. § 1809(a) (prohibiting any person from intentionally “engag[ing] . . . in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized 1 Chapter 119 of title 18, which was enacted by Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, as amended, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2521 (2000 & West Supp. 2005), is often referred to as “Title III.” by statute”). The AUMF, as construed by the Supreme Court in Hamdi and as confirmed by the history and tradition of armed conflict, is just such a statute. Accordingly, electronic surveillance conducted by the President pursuant to the AUMF, including the NSA activities, is fully consistent with FISA and falls within category I of Justice Jackson’s framework.

Even if there were ambiguity about whether FISA, read together with the AUMF, permits the President to authorize the NSA activities, the canon of constitutional avoidance requires reading these statutes in harmony to overcome any restrictions in FISA and Title III, at least as they might otherwise apply to the congressionally authorized armed conflict with al Qaeda. Indeed, were FISA and Title III interpreted to impede the President’s ability to use the traditional tool of electronic surveillance to detect and prevent future attacks by a declared enemy that has already struck at the homeland and is engaged in ongoing operations against the United States, the constitutionality of FISA, as applied to that situation, would be called into very serious doubt. In fact, if this difficult constitutional question had to be addressed, FISA would be unconstitutional as applied to this narrow context. Importantly, the FISA Court of Review itself recognized just three years ago that the President retains constitutional authority to conduct foreign surveillance apart from the FISA framework, and the President is certainly entitled, at a minimum, to rely on that judicial interpretation of the Constitution and FISA.

We've already heard this argument, but the new document makes the structure of the argument very clear: the activities should be seen as not violating FISA (because of the AUMF), but if a conflict with FISA is seen, the President still has the power (because FISA would be unconstitutional as an infringement of his Article II powers). The latter argument is also held up as a reason to interpret FISA not to see a conflict (because statutes should be interpreted to avoid difficult questions of constitutional law). That is, any ambiguities in coordinating FISA and AUMF should be resolved in favor of presidential power.

The document also deals with the question whether the Fourth Amendment is violated.

Here is the NYT article about this new document.

Orin Kerr says: "The new document is basically an appellate brief filed in the Court of Public Opinion." Well, Public, what do you think?

Monitoring faculty suspected of politicizing the classroom.

Listen to the NPR report on the Bruin Alumni Association, a group that is offering money to UCLA students who record professors who it thinks are bringing too much left-wing politics to the classroom.

Here's the group's website, courtesy of Stephen Bainbridge, who is a UCLA professor and has a thing or two to say about the project.

The group defends itself here:

UCLAProfs.com is not conducting a witch-hunt, engaging in police-state surveillance, or targeting privately-held political beliefs. We are concerned solely with indoctrination, one-sided presentation of ideological controversies, and unprofessional classroom behavior, no matter where it falls on the ideological spectrum. As an illustrative example of egregious behavior with which UCLAProfs is concerned, please review the article BAA President Andrew Jones wrote about his experience in a 2002 political science class. Occasional political remarks, jokes, or the like are generally harmless behavior. We are concerned with a class which in full any reasonable observer would agree was taught in an unacceptable or unprofessional manner...

Accusing a professor of unprofessional behavior is in essence an accusation of professional malfeasance. UCLAProfs.com will air such charges only after extended reviews of a professor’s record. The taping of lectures leaves no room for a vengeful student to take questionable statements out of context, to (deliberately or inadvertently) misquote a professor, or to otherwise give a false portrait of the class. As such, we find the current hysteria, and the many intemperate accusations that the UCLAProfs.com program is a “blacklist,” “ratting out” professors, or other contemptible phenomenon, to be a severe distortion.

Eugene Volokh, also a UCLA professor, also has commentary:

I ... think the offering of money to students is a bit unsavory, though I'm not positive how bad it is; much information-gathering, after all, is done by people who get paid, and sometimes get paid in rough correlation to the stuff they unearth...

Nonetheless, I do think we need to put all this in perspective. My colleagues and I are public servants. We have a certain degree of influence over public affairs, both through our public commentary and through our teaching. Others disagree with us, and think we're doing a public disservice rather than a public service. They're entitled to criticize us, and to monitor our public performance of our duties to see whether that performance is, in their view, lacking. I try to imagine what I would think if someone from the Left set up a site to criticize Prof. Bainbridge, me, and my (rather few) conservative colleagues, and to solicit concrete evidence of our supposed misdeeds; I would like to think that I would recognize that this was their right, both legally and ethically.

Putting their right to do it to the side, there is something awfully disturbing about displaying a list of names like this. It just looks ugly and intended to intimidate. I don't see why an organization that purports to be concerned about fairness would want to operate in this fashion. It's self-defeating. And their current complaint that people are reacting to them in an "intemperate" way is rather amusing. What did they expect?

"So what happens now? Uh, well, I guess I get to go around giving people the Vulcan salute."

Richard finds out, after a lifetime spent with the name Cohen, that he's a Cohen.

"The number one actor in the world as far as I'm concerned is Johnny Depp."

So says Christopher Lee, in the midst of criticizing the film industry today for casting based on looks and not talent.

"The problem today, and I think it's a very dangerous one for the people concerned, is that there are quite large numbers of very young men and women - boys and girls to me - from 18 to 30, and they are playing very large parts in huge films and they simply, through no fault of their own, don't have the background and the experience and the knowledge to pull if off.

"And it's dangerous for them because if they are in one failure after another, sooner or later people are going to say, 'well, he may have a pretty face but he's not bringing the public in'.

"So many of these good-looking - sometimes even pretty - boys and girls are getting these good roles and it's not fair on them. At some point it's going to catch up."

Of course, no one is better looking than Johnny Depp.

The gender gap in education.

Richard Whitmire, in The New Republic, considers the new gender gap in education and the lack of attention to it. Boys, not girls, are falling behind. The studies and statistics are very hard to face up to. After so much attention to helping girls overcome their educational problems, it's difficult to believe we need to change things to cater to boys, especially when the primary complaint about the boys seems to be that they aren't motivated to work as hard as the girls. And then there is the notion that there's a profound difference at the neurological level:

The brains of men and women are very different. Last spring, Scientific American summed up the best gender and brain research, including a study demonstrating that women have greater neuron density in the temporal lobe cortex, the region of the brain associated with verbal skills. Now we've reached the heart of the mystery. Girls have genetic advantages that make them better readers, especially early in life. And, now, society is favoring verbal skills. Even in math, the emphasis has shifted away from guy-friendly problems involving quick calculations to word and logic problems.

Increasingly, teachers ask students to keep written journals, even as early as kindergarten. What gets written isn't polished prose, but it is important training, say teachers, some of whom rely on the book Kid Writing, which advocates the use of writing to teach children basic skills in a host of subjects. The teachers are only doing their jobs, preparing their students for a work world that has moved rapidly away from manufacturing and agriculture and into information-based work. It's not that schools have changed their ways to favor girls; it's that they haven't changed their ways to help boys adjust to this new world.

Suddenly, the anecdotal evidence becomes obvious. Open the door of any ninth-grade "academy" that some school districts run--the clump of students predicted to sink in high school--and you'll see a potential football team. Nearly all guys. Ninth grade is where boys' verbal deficit becomes an albatross that stymies further male academic achievement. That's the year guys run into the fruits of the school-reform movement that date back to the 1989 governors' summit in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Democrats and Republicans vowed to shake up schools. One outcome of the summit is that, starting in ninth grade, every student now gets a verbally drenched curriculum that is supposed to better prepare them for college. Good goal, but it's leaving boys in the dust.

What's the solution? The article offers little other than the importance of acknowledging that there is a problem. Well, there's a suggestion high school textbooks be made into comic books to help boys. If the problem really is as bad as this article makes it sound, shouldn't we consider separating the boys from the girls?

UPDATE: I wanted to add that I would strongly object to public schools offering only all-boys and all-girls schools. I think instead there could be two schools, one adapted to the set of skills and behaviors that these scientific studies are associating with with boys and the others doing the same with girls, but then each child could choose which one to attend. For example, one school could have frequent sports breaks and the other could have longer classes. One could have high pressure exams and the other a steady flow of homework assignments.

"I think that by ignoring the show you're ignoring the audience who put you there."

Says Simon Cowell, criticizing Kelly Clarkson, who won't agree to let them sing her songs on "American Idol." He's a jerk for criticizing her openly like that. He should just accept that she needs to develop away from the show. That's part of what being a star is. He shouldn't want it to be that the stardom you get out of the show requires you to remain anchored to it.

Clarkson has become a major star in the past year, with her hit "Since U Been Gone" earning both massive sales and critical respect, particularly from a rock community that has looked upon "American Idol" contestants warily. Her album "Breakaway" earned a Grammy nomination for best pop vocal album.

He should appreciate that the show was able to put someone on a path to real credibility, but I suppose he doesn't like to think that the show's aura becomes a bad thing.

UPDATE: Looks like she backed down. Afraid of the bad press? I guess she hasn't really attained diva status.

"It is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science."

The official Vatican newspaper opposes teaching Intelligent Design as science:

"If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another," Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L'Osservatore Romano.

"But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science," he wrote, calling intelligent design unscientific. "It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious."

"You've become the designer that it's fun to $%# with."

Says Andrae to Santino on last night's "Project Runway." Santino's rude arrogance and dedication to a somewhat flaky personal vision amuse me no end. People keep telling him his designs have "too much going on," but he won't stop. He thinks he can go wildly astray and then talk a good game:



Speaking of Andrae, he's been so hysterical in the past that it was nice to see him focus when the overlock machines failed. Who gives up his own time to fix the machines everyone needs to use? I liked that.

The task is to make a skating costume for Sasha Cohen, and that's a weird task, not just because it involves stretch fabric and therefore the dreaded overlock machine, but because skating costumes are in such perverse anti-fashion taste. What does it mean to be good in this category? Pleasing the client? And there's the whole aspect of needing to be able to skate in it. But they're worrying that the models will "pop seams" just walking down the runway. And how can a model look right in a skater's costume? Aren't the skaters tiny little women? We see Sasha Cohen sitting there as one of the judges. She really is tiny. Really pretty too.



Spoilers follow.

"It's not easy to be vulgar and dowdy, but he managed to do it." That was said of Emmett's "Starry Night" creation, and so it's Emmett who must leave, not Santino with his crazily befeathered phoenix-rising-from-the-flames monstrosity:



Santino, saved, turned as he walked off to whisper "Emmett, I'm sorry." Can it be that he's humbled now? It's hard to picture him changing, listening to advice, toning it down. But maybe he wants to win badly enough that he will. I think we saw Andrae evolve this week. Maybe next week there will be a new Santino.

Oh, and poor, poor Emmett, forced to wear that skater shirt, deprived of any way to hide his gut.



UPDATE: Here's the Television Without Pity recap: "Emmett is sent home for showing too much 'tootie.' Three cheers for the use of the word 'tootie.'" (Unusual slang, no? It refers to the lower front of the costume.) TWOP also reminds me of the part where Robert Plotkin from Season 1 of the show makes an appearance as the delivery guy. Kind of like when Bill Rancic appears in post-Season 1 episodes of "The Apprentice." Except -- in so many ways -- not. Well, I couldn't understand why they brought Robert back in Season 1 after he'd been eliminated. All I can think is that someone behind the show thinks the guy has major appeal. I tend to think it's a judgment on the other guys: Robert's the genuinely masculine contestant, so they send him out when they want some masculinity. There's something allusively pornographic about the role of delivery guy.

"I've always wanted to be on a plane -- uh -- it's kind of a silly dream..."

That's a beautiful, classic "American Idol" quote. If you think the show is just a lot of deluded, narcissistic Americans, you need to see Garet Johnson, a cowboy, who's never sung in public, who sings Elton John's "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," and who has no money for lessons and doesn't even have a place in a church choir to learn something. It's heartbreaking.

He's from "a town of 4 people," "just a cowboy that loves to sing" -- only ever sung in front of a turkey, and says "I need to sing for people." Maybe the show is just manipulating me at this point, but -- damn! -- it works. I break down in tears.

The abortion case fizzles.

The abortion case fizzles as the Court avoids the "undue burden" question and reverses because the lower court "chose the most blunt remedy." The unanimous decision was written by Justice O'Connor, in perhaps her last opinion.

Justices said a lower court went too far by permanently blocking the law that requires a parent to be told before a daughter ends her pregnancy.

An appeals court must now reconsider the law, which requires that a parent be informed 48 hours before a minor child has an abortion but makes no exception for a medical emergency that threatens the youth's health.

ADDED: From the opinion:

When a statute restricting access to abortion may be applied in a manner that harms women's health, what is the appropriate relief? Generally speaking, when confronting a constitutional flaw in a statute, we try to limit the solution to the problem. We prefer, for example, to enjoin only the unconstitutional applications of a statute while leaving other applications in force or to sever its problematic portions while leaving the remainder intact….

In this case, the courts below chose the most blunt remedy -- permanently enjoining the enforcement of New Hampshire's parental notification law and thereby invalidating it entirely. That is understandable, for we, too, have previously invalidated an abortion statute in its entirety because of the same constitutional flaw. In Stenberg, we addressed a Nebraska law banning so-called "partial birth abortion" unless the procedure was necessary to save the pregnant woman's life. We held Nebraska's law unconstitutional because it lacked a health exception. But the parties in Stenberg did not ask for, and we did not contemplate, relief more finely drawn.

In the case that is before us, however, we agree with New Hampshire that the lower courts need not have invalidated the law wholesale. Respondents, too, recognize the possibility of a modest remedy: They pleaded for any relief "just and proper," and conceded at oral argument that carefully crafted injunctive relief may resolve this case.

"So then why do we need them? Why is it so bad -- in your view -- to have fatherless households?"

Salon has a big, antagonistic interview with Kate O'Beirne (about her book "Women Who Make the World Worse").