Having just visited, last week, the spot where the Wright brothers made the first flight a mere 106 years ago, I was especially struck by this rant about Americans' growing, and annoying, sense of technological entitlement, by the comedian Louis C.K.

He recounts sitting next to a guy on an airplane who got royally peeved when the newly installed plane-based Wi-Fi service conked out, mid-flight: "How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago."

It would make more sense, "LCK" suggests, for airline passengers to spend much of their trips with their mouths agape with awe and delight.

(Hat tip: Matt Kaiser)

Those of us who think modern bloggers and Twitterers have taken self-chronicling (or self-absorption) to new heights (or depths) might consider the case of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States. Over 69 years, Quincy Adams filled 51 volumes with diaristic entries, and he was frequently juggling several diaries. One included lengthy entries, another shorter musings, and a third summed up his day in telegraphic style. Examples from the tersest diary include the following:

January 1, 1795: "Thursday. The Hague. Attended the Stadtholder's Court. Paid official New Years day visits."

October 12, 1800: "My cough getting better. Walk round the Walls. Reading Amadis de Gaulis. Tedious."

November 22, 1831: "Thunder and Snow. Letter on Imprisonment for debt. Reading on Masonry."

Reading on masonry!

A few months ago, a student touring the Massachusetts Historical Society observed, upon hearing of these entries, "It's like he's using Twitter."

"That got the wheels spinning" at the society, wrote Jeremy Dibble, a librarian there, on its official blog, The Beehive, this week. The results of their brainstorming? The historical society plans to launch a John Quincy Adams Twitter feed next week.

They're taking advantage of a nice historical coincidence. Adams's line-a-day diary entries cover two periods: January 1, 1795 to May 12, 1801; and August 5, 1809 to April 30, 1836. August 5, therefore, marks the 200th anniversary of the start of Adams's second round of line-a-day writing, which begin as Adams is departing for Russia, where he would serve as the first U.S. ambassador.

Readers can follow Adams's daily thoughts, 200 years later to the day, at http://twitter.com/JQAdams_MHS. "His short entries are surprisingly rich, full of wonderful details about his reading, meals, weather, and shipboard activities," Dibbell writes. Where possible, the tweets will include additional information about Adams's whereabouts, links to longer diary entries, and other contextual nuggets.

"This is an exciting opportunity for us to test out some new technological tools (and to create a transcription of the line-a-day diaries, which will be useful for future projects as well)," Dibbell concludes.

A brouhaha erupted recently when Wikipedia published the 10 original images created by the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach and deployed ever since in the famous "Rorschach test." (In Inkblot No. 2, do you see two red-hatted gnomes giving each other high-fives, or -- well, something more sinister or sexual?) Critics of Wikipedia's decision not to remove the images argued that if they became widely known future Rorschach tests would be compromised.

The debate is beside the point, argues Wray Herbert, in Newsweek. That's because, he says, the Rorschach test has never produced psychologically useful data …

This is such a perfect rock-star-fantasy story that the video brings a sentimental tear to my eye. Yes, I know it's not the first time it's happened, but the combination of fan, band, and audience reaction is about as good as it gets.

And XX Factor captures the feminist angle: "Sorry, Courtney Cox-in-'Dancing in the Dark' -- as concert fantasies go, this one is way better."

Is it just me or does Billie Joe Armstrong appear to direct Stephanie -- the fan-turned-guitar-hero -- to get out of out of the spotlight in the middle of the song, before realizing the magnitude of star he has on his hands? To his credit, by the end he is appropriately bowing and scraping before her.

PS Additional gratuitous guitar-hero content here. (Talking Heads, "Crosseyed and Painless," Rome, Adrian Belew, 1980.) Yes, this is a poor excuse for a link, but, still, check it out.

One of the skeletons in the closet of the New Republic, Betsy McCaughey, whose misleading writings on the Clinton health plan in the 1990s are often cited as one of the causes of its demise, has returned to try to scupper President Obama's health-care agenda. To be sure, she's not making her claims in that magazine, where she is persona non grata. Her piece, published during Andrew Sullivan's editorial reign, is widely viewed (at least by the center-left) as one of the publication's worst missteps, and the present editor, Franklin Foer, has explicitly disowned it.

"The law will prevent you from going outside the system to buy basic health coverage you think is better," McCaughey opined back in 1994. "The doctor can be paid only by the plan, not by you."

McCaughey's piece became a rallying point for those who wanted to kill the plan, but her claims "were simply false," as James Fallows later wrote. They were flatly contradicted by the text of the bill.

And now she's popped up again, notes blogger Greg Sargent. Her argument this time? The Obama health-reform plan will lead to "government-encouraged euthanasia." Already the talking point has been picked up by House Minority Leader John Boehner, Sean Hannity, and Fred Thompson.

Here's the grain of truth behind the over-the-top assertion. Under one proposal, Medicare for the first time would cover "advanced care" consultations with one's doctor, which might include discussions of how the patient wants to handle so-called end-stage care. An executive vice president for AARP (a group you'd expect to have some reservations about knocking off old people) explained to Politico what the point of the provision was, in AARP's eyes: "This measure would not only help people make the best decisions for themselves but also better ensure that their wishes are followed. To suggest otherwise is a gross, and even cruel, distortion -- especially for any family that has been forced to make the difficult decisions on care for loved ones approaching the end of their lives." What's more, the provision is entirely optional.

For its part, Politico put a world-class "objective" headline on the piece: "Will proposal promote euthanasia?"

(Via McCaughey's chief enabler)

Richard Posner launched a broadside against so-called behavioral economics in the Wall Street Journal last week, and included some notably pointed remarks about his University of Chicago colleague Richard Thaler, a pioneer in the subfield and co-author of the bestseller "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness." Yesterday, Thaler nudged back, hard.

Posner, an appeals-court judge who also teaches at the University of Chicago Law School, charged that the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, an Obama administration pet project influenced by the insights of behavioral economics, would end up treating consumers like children rather than "consenting adults." (Two Harvard law professors were caught in the crossfire: Cass Sunstein, Thaler's co-author on "Nudge" and president Obama's nominee for the post of "regulatory czar" and Elizabeth Warren, who has been mentioned as a possible chairwoman of the new agency.)

One goal of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency would be to warn people about the dangers of home mortgages that include low teaser rates, demand no down payments, or penalize consumers for early payoffs. Such complex mortgages have been widely blamed for the explosion in the number of foreclosures over the last year. The administration has suggested that the agency might put its stamp of approval on a small number of "plain vanilla" mortgages, with easy-to-grasp requirements. A bank that wanted to deviate from those simple mortgages would be required to flag and to carefully explain the extra risks being introduced.

The idea comes straight from the playbook of Thaler, a Chicago business professor, Posner noted, before turning up the heat. "Mr. Thaler … calls himself a 'libertarian paternalist.' But that is an oxymoron. He is a paternalist with a velvet glove -- as the agency will be." Consumers and banks will end up being bullied by the agency, Posner said: it might "outlaw" such useful offerings as variable-rate mortgages, in which buyers assume future risk for the benefit of lower rates. "Is the choice among such alternatives really beyond the cognitive competence of the average home buyer?" Posner asked.

It is hubristic, Posner continued, for people like Thaler to think they know better than American consumers, especially when they themselves are subject to cognitive errors. What sort of cognitive errors? Here comes the "gotcha": Thaler, he pointed out, had argued up until shortly before the stock-market crash that equities were undervalued and, as a result, that many Americans would be better off pouring more of their savings into stocks. If you'd stuck to that advice, you'd have gotten soaked.

Granted space to respond on the PBS Web site by Paul Solman, a PBS correspondent, Thaler also deployed some charged rhetoric, leading off with the suggestion that opposing restrictions on risky mortgages is analogous to opposing restrictions on the sale of cribs known to kill toddlers. (Free choice, consenting adults.)

He went on to call Posner's summary of the Obama proposal "seriously misleading." For one thing, Thaler said, the administration has made clear that a variable-rate mortgage will be included among the vanilla offerings. Riskier products would not be outright banned either, although consumers might have to demonstrate that they understood the risks.

Finally, he proposed that Posner's syllogism -- Thaler makes mistakes, therefore Thaler should not try to help people avoid mistakes -- was fundamentally flawed:

No government agency (or judge) will be error-free. The goal of the Nudge agenda sketched out in my co-authored book of that title was to create decision-making environments in which it is easier for error-prone human decision makers to choose well. The Agency proposed by the administration is a good example of this kind of thinking. Even imperfect experts can help us achieve better outcomes, just as imperfect judges can help us enforce the law fairly.

But, yes, he wishes he'd unloaded more stocks before last summer. (Don't we all.)

(Via The Volokh Conspiracy)

I had precisely the same reaction as soon as I came across the word "spinnakered" in the Nicholson Baker piece that I blogged about yesterday. Also "pheromonal." The guy is good. (Forget what you hear from Leon Wieseltier or Anne Applebaum.)

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Officer James Crowley, and President Obama are going to sit down and drink beer together, and chat.

Christopher Hitchens, meanwhile, recounts an incident in which, "almost intoxicated," he mouthed off to a police officer. The Slate columnist was rendered semi-tipsy, he says, by his "mere possession of constitutional rights."

In 1908, when "The Wind in the Willows" first appeared, the Times Literary Supplement said that "children will hope, in vain[,] for more fun." There's something to that, as the literary critic Michael Dirda notes in the latest New York Review of Books, in the course of reviewing two new annotated versions of the classic. (Katherine A. Powers reviewed the same books for the Globe in May.) The language is dense and, except for Toad's reckless driving and, subsequently, his escape from prison, the tale a bit short on action. As the biographer of Kenneth Grahame, Peter Green, put it, the book is suffused with "timeless, drowsy beatitude."

Still, Dirda may go a step too far when he draws a parallel with another major author of the period:

While "The Wind in the Willows" certainly has the appearance of a children's book, this masterpiece nevertheless tends to be most deeply affecting to those past forty. It's a bedtime story for readers of Henry James, and throughout its pages one periodically hears the faint, wistful cry that haunts Strether in 'The Ambassadors' (1903): "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to."

"Wind" is a rich book, grounded (as C.S. Lewis observed) in a sophisticated understanding of English social life. But "A The Portrait of a Toad" it is not.

Incidentally, Peter Green, the Grahame biographer whom Dirda cites, is none other than Peter Green the noted classicist. Who knew Green was also, at least early in his career, a "Wind in the Willows" aficionado?

Maybe, I thought, if I ordered this wireless Kindle 2 I would be pulled into a world of compulsive, demonic book consumption, like Pippen staring at the stone of Orthanc. Maybe I would gorge myself on Rebecca West, or Jack Vance, or Dawn Powell. Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.

Or, just maybe, Baker would buy a Kindle and then pan it, at length.

Raise your hand if you thought Nicholson Baker, of all people, was going to give the Kindle a rave review.

Andrew Bush's photographs of ordinary people driving, on view in his book "Drive" as well as two recent shows in New York, convey the intimate side of the automobile era, and they carry a fresh poignancy, too, given the recent near-collapse of the American car industry.

Unlike much car photography, Bush's images aren't about the machines, as Adam Harrison Levy, a writer and documentary filmmaker, points out in a fine essay posted at Design Observer. You won't find fetishism of the Mustang, Corvette, or various other exemplars of Detroit engineering and design. (Though check out this dude, who seems to have driven straight out of a mid-'70s magazine ad for a Camaro.) Rather, the photographs are about the relationship between humans and their vehicles. "It's been over one hundred years since the combustion engine was first invented," Levy writes, "and we now eat, drink, talk and die in our cars as naturally as we do in our domestic spaces." Bush's photos, it's worth noting, predate the cell phone, which wedged its way awkwardly between humankind and car, changing the dynamic.

Levy contrasts the people on view in Bush's work with the newspaper-reading subway commuters from the 1930s and '40s whom Walker Evans captured in his book "Many are Called":

The subjects of Andrew Bush's photographs … seem freer and more expressive but they are also appear more alone and anxious. They have gained their autonomy but at what price?

The classic era of the American automobile could be said to begin in 1956, with the birth of the interstate highway system. Could 2009 mark the terminus? And, a decade from now, will photographs of commuters in their Insights and Priuses carry the cultural punch that Bush's images do?

My ambivalence about the tax that President Obama is considering levying on the nation's top earners, in order to finance health-care reform, has been somewhat alleviated: via Gizmodo comes word of a mother in Williamsville, NY, who had a 98-inch television mounted in the ceiling of her teenage son's bedroom.

The unnamed young man is a gamer, but his real passion is evidently "viewing and editing his own videos." Because of the weight of the screen and the television's image-projector -- this is no ordinary plasma or LCD device -- the ceiling in question had to be reframed and reinforced.

The project earned Patti Deni, the mother in question, finalist status in the 2009 Home of the Year Awards, handed out by Electronic House magazine. Gizmodo, however -- never mind the site's commenters -- was somewhat uncharitable in its remarks about the possible effects of this gift on the young man's future physical fitness and social skills.

Michael Hirschorn is surely correct when he writes, in the latest Atlantic, that virtually every "editor of a vaguely upscale magazine nurses a hard case of Economist envy." Indeed, Time's editor in chief, Richard Stengel, is on record as saying the esteemed and highly profitable British weekly is one of the models he's looking to as he tries to reinvent his own flagging brand.

So why then, Hirschorn asks, do these editors, in chasing The Economist, more often end up producing issues that read like knock-offs of The Atlantic, a magazine which, he wryly notes, "has never delivered impressive profit margins"?

It's because somehow they've got it into their heads that The Economist is about highbrow reporting and commentary, when, in fact, The Economist is a digest, a survey of information, much of it available elsewhere, which smart, busy people believe they need to stay abreast of (delivered, of course, with witty, Anglophile-attracting brio).

In other words, Hirschorn concludes, The Economist was parasitical on the traditional media long before bloggers got in on the game. Stretching the metaphor just a tad, we might even think of The Economist -- the print version -- as a blog "avant la lettre." (On the other hand, The Economist is fairly lazy as a digital entity, Hirschorn suggests.)

Presenting a news-and-analysis digest is simply not what the "new" Time and Newsweek are doing. They've been distracted by the good-writing part of the formula. Meanwhile, the humble magazine The Week, which is aping the digest model, minus The Economist's flair, has been the rare magazine success story of recent years.

As part of an art-project-cum-experiment in living, two brothers are living on the vertical facade of a building in the Old Center section of Rio de Janeiro, reports Archinect. Since May, twenty-seven-year-old Tiago Primo and his twenty-year-old brother Gabriel have been spending twelve hours a day suspended above the street on an outdoors wall equipped with a bed, sofa, hammock, coffee table, houseplant, and -- naturally! -- a victrola. The wall is also outfitted with climbing pegs and other mountaineering gear so the brothers can move easily from the bottom "floor," which is painted red, to the top one, painted yellow. Archinect does not say when the experiment/installation will end.

How did Yale get the reputation as being the most pro-gay Ivy League college? Certainly not through the efforts of administrators, who did everything they could to fend off that rap. In 1987, when the journalist Julie Iovine, Yale '77, wrote a feature article for the Wall Street Journal asserting that her alma mater was "suddenly … a gay school," then-president Benno Schmidt wrote 2,000 of Yale's most influential alumni to rebut the piece.

Now, in the Yale Alumni Magazine, George Chauncey, a Yale history professor and author of the landmark "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940," tells the story of how gay activists changed Yale from within. They transformed it from a place from which the future AIDS activist Larry Kramer felt so alienated, in the 1950s, that he attempted suicide his freshman year--a psychologist he subsequently saw warned him to steer clear of the few gay friends he'd made on campus--to one in which a gay freshman could write, last fall: "Whereas the majority of students at my high school regarded gays and lesbians as outsiders, people fundamentally unlike themselves, Yale undergraduates seem to regard gays and lesbians as perfectly normal."

"I still marvel at how different his freshman year was from mine," writes Chauncey, who graduated from Yale in 1977 and got a Ph.D., again in New Haven, in 1989.

Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha: dynasties with names like these were supposed to rule Europe during the 20th century. Instead, they faded into irrelevance, losing their crowns after the world waltzed off a cliff and into the inferno of World War I.

A new book from the University of Chicago Press, (first published by Oxford's Bodleian Library), offers a curiously poignant window onto the vanished milieu of archdukes, princesses, and duchesses. Drawing from a private collection, "Postcards of the Lost Royals" is a small, elegant volume composed of cards featuring photographs of various royal figures, posing formally. The cards were mailed by, or marketed to, ordinary citizens who counted themselves fans, of a sort, of these men and women.

To be sure, there are some absurd, baroque mustaches on display. But the historian Andrew Roberts, in an introduction, suggests we look at these figures with sympathy. And even regret: "As they stand there, sometimes pompously but more often simply dutifully, in their uniforms, high boots, pickelhaube, or spiked helmets, epaulettes, swords, sashes, orders, medals, stars, and decorations, they seem to mourn their lost thrones, but so should we. Compared to what came after them, the pre-1914 crowned heads of Europe were a generally benevolent bunch … "

Roberts writes that there was one "crucial" exception: "the deeply psychologically flawed Kaiser Wilhelm II."

Two new books have appeared about Isaiah Berlin, the noted historian of ideas. One, the rather grandiosely named "The Book of Isaiah," includes reminiscences of Berlin by his friends, fellow dons, and students. The other is a collection of verbose letters he wrote (or "wrote," as he often used a Dictaphone) from 1946 to 1960.

Both books were edited by Henry Hardy, an English writer and literary figure. Yet, according to a review by A.N. Wilson, in the Times of London, Hardy seems not to have noticed that the two books offer strikingly different portraits of Berlin; they are often at cross-purposes.

"He was never sneaky or malevolent," observes Noel Annan in "The Book of Isaiah." Yet the letters display ample evidence of sneaky malevolence.

Consider Berlin's correspondence with and about A.L. Rowse, a historian of Elizabethan England and supposed friend. The 800 pages of letters "are peppered with malice about" Rowse, notes Wilson:

Rowse "grows more and more impossible and awful daily." Rowse’s absence is "a source of happiness." Rowse is "more Malvolio like than ever." Yet to Rowse himself, Berlin writes an Iago-like letter in which he says, "One cannot live for twenty years on and off with someone as wonderful & unique as, if you'll let me say so, you are & not develop a strong and permanent bond."

"It is hard," concludes Wilson, "to like the author of this letter." Meanwhile, Wilson observes, Rowse was writing the long, important books that Berlin never quite got around to.

Berlin did similar numbers on other friends, rejoiced in the social failures of various nemeses, and evinced snobbish delight in his parleys with dukes and duchesses. Writes Wilson: "If the reader, and even more the conscientious reviewer, who has read each page with notebook in hand, feels that the exercise of reading was a waste of time, that only half explains the misery that the exercise provokes. Reading the book, after all, takes only a week. But writing these tedious, infelicitous, prolix letters took fourteen years of a clever man’s life."

(Via The Awl)

Look who's jumping on the social-networking bandwagon: none other than the Nature Publishing Group, the 140-year-old British company best-known for its flagship science journal, Nature.

The online venture is called Scitable, and it's being run by a Cambridge-based team, Nature Education. (Near Kendall Square, not Cambridge U.)

Scitable offers a space in which college and advanced high-school students can find high-quality essays about science topics. Students who sign on as members can ask each other questions, embark on research collaborations with each other, and even connect with professors. And there's an "Ask an expert" feature (Nature Education staff do some vetting to make sure students aren't just submitting their homework). Professors, too, can use Scitable to form networks, for example to create online adjuncts to their courses.

Scitable's content currently centers on genetics and evolution, but it will eventually broaden to include the other life sciences, and then the physical sciences.

"One of our starting points," says Vikram Savkar, senior vice president and publishing director of Nature Education, "was that where students like to be, even during education, is online. But what they find online is not always credible." In one survey, his team found that when students have a question about science 80 percent turn to Wikipedia first.

Nature Education also wants to patch some holes in the leaky pipeline of science education. Scientists often lament that curious children get bumped off the science path in junior high, high school, and even college. "At every point along the way," says Savkar, "it is important that they have access to information that keeps them passionate."

All worthy goals, and the Nature Publishing Group has an obvious interest in keeping up the numbers of future science-journal subscribers. But given that pretty much everything on Scitable is now free, how will the site generate revenue? In addition to the usual (shaky) sources like advertising and sponsors, Savkar says Scitable plans to offer "premium" services like online tutoring and test preparation, which have proved quite lucrative for other companies.

Straw, sticks, or brick? Structural stability versus ease of construction?

"The Three Little Pigs" has always been, at heart, a tale about architecture. Steven Guarnaccia, the chair of the illustration program at the Parsons New School, has just made that connection more explicit than usual. In his version of the story, just published by the art-book publisher Corraini (and available in both Italian and English), the three little pigs appear in the form of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Frank Gehry.

"In their famous buildings," says the publicity copy for the book, "they live among objects designed by some of the most internationally representative architects and designers. But one day the wolf pays a visit to them … "

Apart from introducing children to three great modern architects, albeit with snouts, the book serves as a more general reference work on modern design, as the houses' ample furnishings are identified in a glossary.

The book is a follow-up to Guarnaccia's take of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," in which Goldilocks discovers that the bear-chair that fits her best is a 1946 classic by Charles and Ray Eames. (Just right -- in that midcentury-modern way!)

(Via A Daily Dose of Architecture and Cool Hunting)

The former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani's recent intervention in the unrest in Iran, in which he suggested that the current government had diverged from the principles of the 1979 Islamic revolution, is the latest twist in a political drama whose subtleties can be difficult for outsiders to divine. Laura Secor, a New Yorker contributor at work on a book about Iran, recently recommended a half-dozen books for readers in need of a crash course in Iran's complex recent history and politics:

"The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran," by Roy Mottahedeh, a professor at Harvard.

"An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari'ati," by Ali Rahnema. Shari'ati, Secor explains, "was the lay intellectual whose ingenious concoction of Shi'ism and Marxism helped ignite his country's revolution in 1979."

"Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran," by Ervand Abrahamian.

"The Soul of Iran: A Nation's Journey to Freedom," by Afshin Molavi.

"Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope," by Shrin Ebadi.

And, finally, a novel: "The Septembers of Shiraz," by Dalia Sofer. It "tells the story of a Jewish family dispersed by the revolution -- into prison, Brooklyn, and the increasingly besieged family home in Tehran."

Secor made the recommendations on the New Yorker blog The Book Bench.

When Americans and Western Europeans think of the Holocaust, we tend to recall the narratives of survivors writers like Primo Levi and Anne Frank, and the horrors of Auschwitz. But worse horrors, if it is not obscene to speak comparatively in this way, happened in places where there were no survivors, writes the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, in the latest New York Review of Books:

"The Diary of Anne Frank" concerns assimilated European Jewish communities, the Dutch and German, whose tragedy, though horrible, was a very small part of the Holocaust. By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.…

The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today's Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.

The numbers of dead that Snyder mentions at various points in his essay are astounding even for someone used to reading about World War II. The German leadership, he writes, planned to intentionally starve as many as 80 million people in order to make room for the Aryan colonization of Eastern Europe and Russia.

And the German military leaders who have recently received attention and praise in the popular media for attempting to kill Hitler in 1944? (I.e., Tom Cruise's "Valkyrie.") A number of them "were right at the center of mass killing policies."

Snyder is at work on a book called "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin."

Another tidbit from "Thinking Like a Lawyer," the Harvard University Press book I mentioned yesterday, by Frederick Schauer:

For some years now, political scientists have used sophisticated techniques of multiple regression to determine what really does influence case outcomes in the Supreme Court. Researchers have examined a range of factors and concluded that ideology, more than personal characteristics of the judge, legal variables of text and precedent, or anything else, is the leading predictor of Supreme Court outcomes.

This "should not be surprising," Schauer writes, because cases make it all the way to the Supreme Court "either because there is no law on the subject or because there are equally good legal arguments on both sides."

This observation has sometimes been reduced to the epigram "We are all Legal Realists now," but Schauer rejects that formulation, because it masks something important: Legal Realism, or the notion that there is no "right" answer to the most complex constitutional questions and therefore extra-legal considerations inevitably come into play, is what you might call a meta-theory. It may explain patterns in the results of cases, but judges (and law students) must still display mastery of the traditional concepts and special vocabulary of the law.

As a result, for example,"any student who thinks that a strong Realist perspective will be rewarded on law school examinations is in for a nasty shock." Likewise, Judge Sotomayor or Chief Justice Roberts could never get away with grounding a decision in an affirmative-action case in a personal psychological narrative, although life experience and psychological inclinations may well be the dispositive factors in where they come down.

Schauer makes a few tentative stabs at resolving the tension between traditional legal techniques and the insights of Legal Realism, but the central problem lingers. To be fair, resolution of the problem may be beyond the scope of his text, which is labeled as an introduction.

More significantly, the problem may be insoluble under our current system, because once you acknowledge the political aspects of judicial decisions, the rationale for an unelected third branch of government begins to erode.

Has anyone, during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, quoted the sainted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on the subject of whether law is simply a matter of applying rules and adhering to precedent, as Senator Sessions evidently believes -- and as Judge Sotomayor is pretending to agree with?

"The life of the law," Holmes famously wrote, in 1881, "has not been logic; it has been experience." I'm drawing the quote from "The Challenge of Legal Realism," a chapter in the University of Virginia law professor Frederick Schauer's new book "Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning."

With that statement, Holmes was departing from the reigning view that law was "a largely logical and deductive march from one case to the next," Schauer writes. In contrast, Holmes "had concluded that changes in legal doctrine were largely a function of an experience-based and empirical determination by judges who, when changing the law, were undoubtedly making policy choices dictated neither by logic nor by existing law."

This was one of the first stirrings of a movement within legal scholarship that came to be called Legal Realism. "Viewed in hindsight," Schauer continues, "Holmes' views seem scarcely remarkable, let alone radical."

Except, that is, to members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

(To be sure, Schauer does not believe that Holmes's statement captures all there is to be said about how lawyers and judges think; he gives precedent and analogy their due. For anyone who wants a readable primer on legal reasoning and is frustrated by the caricature they've been presented with this week, this book is highly recommended. I may quote a few more snippets from it.)

"Saturated with lachrymose melodies, dirgelike rhythms and the ghastly, fatal oompahs of sad waltzes," writes the music professor David Schiff, in The Nation, "the songs and symphonies of Gustav Mahler prophetically mourn the victims of twentieth-century catastrophes the composer died too soon to witness, or perhaps even imagine."

How can Schiff make such a bold, seemingly anachronistic claim? Because Mahler's influence can be heard in many composers who did, in one way or another, chronicle the horrors of the century that followed 1900: Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, and others.

In his lifetime, however, Mahler hardly seemed such a central figure: "French composers dismissed him as German, Germans considered him to be Viennese and the Viennese either admired or detested him for being a Jew." ("Never mind the sublime notes; it all came down to the nose," Schiff writes.)

(Photo via the Nation. Credit: NYPL / Astor, Tilden and Lenox foundations)

A Flickr user named Happy Monkey has developed a new art form, "tapecraft," that puts a contemporary gloss on the ancient Japanese art of origami. The smallish architectural forms are similarly complex: multifaceted spheroid objects covered with pyramids of various colors, for example. But the key ingredients here are scotch tape and permanent markers.

The works are crafty, DIY, and cheap, a popular combination in these straitened times. Happy Monkey's Flickr page includes step-by-step instructions on how to assemble one shape from scratch, as well as video of one bit of tapecraft that's been equipped with blinking lights.

The artist, a wordsmith as well as a tapesmith, has given some of his works serious technical names. Care to guess which of the above forms is the "rhombitruncated cuboctahedron"?

(Via Boing Boing)

Setting aside competing views about jurisprudence, can we all agree that Supreme Court confirmation hearings have become a joke? Just look at a couple of the quasi-Orwellian headlines that the Sotomayor hearings have inspired this week: "Sotomayor Vows 'Fidelity to the Law' as Hearings Start." Pause for a minute to think about how banal that utterance is. Better yet, imagine the alternate reality in which a judge said the opposite. Then there's the inevitable "Sotomayor Declines to Talk about Abortion Views." Yes, how unreasonable it would be if one of the people who will be determining the abortion policies of the United States for the foreseeable future were to discuss that issue before being granted a lifetime appointment. The phrase "Kabuki theater" doesn't begin to do this stuff justice (as it were).

At Balkinization, Heather Gerken, a Yale Law professor, is similarly dispirited, suggesting that this week's hearings have made her chosen profession look awfully dull, indeed:

Listening to the exchanges, you would never know that the law is a vibrant entity, a remarkable blend of real-world facts and abstract principles. You would never know that lawyering involves nuance and thought. You would think that lawyering is a witless, mechanical exercise and would be surprised to discover that anyone could find a life in the law remotely inspiring.

Someone reading these words might think that these are all code words for describing a "living Constitution," that they are intended to depict law as a tool for social reform. But I think my description would be instantly recognizable to lawyers and judges who flatly reject what has become the traditional liberal take on the law. Lawyering is a craft in which all of us can take pride.

I blame neither the Senators nor Judge Sotomayor for the rather sad and inert picture of the law they've given us. This is simply what judicial confirmation hearings have become. Still, it's too bad that what is perhaps the law's most public moment gives the public so little sense of what a remarkable institution it is.

I don't even think you need to be especially enamored of American constitutional law, as currently practiced, to conclude that modern confirmation hearings have almost nothing to do with it.

(Photo: Brendan Smialowski for New York Times)

A review of "Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right" provides a useful -- if compressed -- overview of some of the issues that scholars of fascism are presently grappling with.

The book features the "leading scholars of the field, both junior and senior," from Europe and the United States. And although it was originally published in 2006, one feels confident asserting that this book has not upended their work, despite assertions to the contrary by its author.

(Via Bookforum)

On NPR the other day, I heard a reporter, citing defense experts, compare cyber-warfare to a nuclear attack. The comparison struck me as outlandish: which kind of assault would you rather be on the receiving end of? In the latest Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, suggests that significant skepticism about the threat posed by cyber-warfare is warranted.

Official reports on cyber-warfare and cyber-terrorism, he writes, "are usually richer in vivid metaphor -- with fears of 'digital Pearl Harbors' and 'cyber-Katrinas' -- than in factual foundation."*

Details about the scope of the cyber-threat are hard to come by. In 2008, for example, a "senior CIA cyber-security analyst" made a widely quoted claim: "We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyberintrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands." But Morozov underscores the vagueness here. When? Where? By whom?

True, both Estonia and Georgia have been the target of genuine cyber-attacks, either by Russian officials or private Russian citizens. (The details remain fuzzy.) In Estonia in 2007, online banking and other crucial services were essentially shut down for a month by outsiders overloading the system. (Such "distributed denial-of-service," or DDoS, attacks often involve thousands of computers, some of them co-opted by "trojan" software.) Something similar happened in Georgia during its August 2008 war with Russia.

But Morozov points out that Georgia is a "technological laggard," with only about 7 percent of its citizens online. Gumming up the Internet there is 1) easy, and 2) kind of beside the point.

Estonia is not a techno-laggard, but is "'cyberlocked,' with limited points of connection … to the external Internet." Similar conditions simply don't obtain in the United States or Western Europe.

Morozov suggests that DDoS attacks pose the greatest threats to private companies unshielded by potent governments (such as gambling sites banned in the U.S. and therefore operating "offshore," which are often the target of blackmail operations), and small nonprofits, which might be bombarded by their political enemies if they say or do something controversial.

Nonprofits simply lack the money to defend themselves. The Pentagon, on the other hand, has ample resources to deter denial-of-service attacks. And as for fears of hackers stealing nuclear codes or blowing up power stations -- well, keeping high-value information away from public networks, or else massively encrypted, is Network Security 101, Morozov maintains. It's well under control.

So what's fueling cyber-war hysteria? Morozov says much of the blame should fall on computer consultants who are using fear as a business strategy. Over the next few years, he writes, a burgeoning "cyber-security market" is slated to "grow twice as fast as the rest of the I.T. industry."

*The prize for excessive rhetoric has to go to this quote, from the C.E.O. of NetWitness, a cybersecurity startup: "cyber-9/11 has happened over the last ten years, but it's happened slowly, so we don't see it."

You don't hear this line of argument much in the mainstream press, but Christopher Hayes, writing in The American Prospect, explores the hypothesis that a good recession (or even depression) can be just what the macroeconomic doctor ordered. That argument, he notes, has a long lineage:

Famed economist Joseph Schumpeter said that "a depression is for capitalism like a good, cold douche," one that rinses off accumulated dysfunction. Robber baron Andrew Mellon (who served as Herbert Hoover's treasury secretary) welcomed the Great Depression with these infamous words: "It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people."

And while they keep such conversations mostly to themselves, there are no few Wall Streeters who still hold similar views, Hayes reports:

Recently a bond trader told me he hoped that the Fed would raise interest rates and plunge economy into a truly deep, painful (but he hoped, quick) depression. "I don't think that would be good for you," I said. "Oh, I'd be fine," he responded. (I meant politically: as in, there'll be people with pitchforks at your door. We were talking past each other I suppose.)

The bond trader meant that he could survive a depression just fine, financially. Would that we all could.

In an irony-drenched piece for Vanity Fair, James Wolcott laments that devices like the Kindle and iPod have cut into one's opportunities to display cultural snobbery. ("What's a Culture Snob to Do?") After all, if you read "Netherland" on the subway but no one sees you, what have you really accomplished?

In response, Conor Clarke, filling in for Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish, earnestly asks: why would anyone mourn the death of the conspicuous consumption of cultural goods? "The original concept of conspicuous consumption," he didactically writes, "introduced by Thorstein Veblen, was all about envy and status. [emphasis in original] You had a generation of rich individuals whose basic consumption demands were easily met, so they turned to forms [of] consumption that made them appear wealthier or smarter or savvier in the eyes of others. But there were, and are, two big problems with this. …" And so on. Wolcott's cultural snobbery is similarly a bad thing, we are led to understand.

How could Wolcott have missed this essential point?

New York 1, wonky Washington 0.

UPDATE: Or should that be "Boston 1, New York 0"? I've been reminded that the Globe's Mark Pothier beat Wolcott to the punch by four years, writing about the iPod's effects on cultural snobbery back in 2005, for Ideas.

That humankind will one day find itself battling robots that we ourselves created has been a staple of science fiction for years (not to mention a go-to gag for writers of The Daily Show, who fret even about the gizmos wielded by CNN anchors). One version of the scenario is that the robots will look like us. So how close are scientists to developing robots that can pass for humans? In the latest issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, in an article titled "Human-Android Interaction in the Near and Distant Future," a psychologist and a professor of computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provide a handy update.

"In reviewing the current state of various robotic technologies," write Neal J. Roese (the psychologist) and Eyal Amir (the computer scientist), "it becomes clear that several fundamental hurdles make it unlikely that the androids of 50 years from now will be indistinguishable from human beings."

Phew. But while that general finding will relieve some people, even as it disappoints others, the article's main interest lies in the details. Five decades hence, robots should have no problem negotiating city streets with aplomb, the authors suggest, either by walking or other means. The technology already exists, although engineers need to improve the durability and robustness of robo-locomotion.

Perhaps surprisingly, the robots of 2060 should also be able to recognize the emotions that flash across human faces, Roase and Amir predict. "This currently is an active and successful area of … research." Moreover, given the state of knowledge about human facial-muscle action, it could well be feasible to create androids that mimic human expressions.

At least from a distance: one hurdle in android tech remains the creation of realistic skin and hair. Even in 50 years, Roese and Amir say, android faces will be identifiable as such from several meters away.

Of course, the development of artificial intelligence remains the largest barrier between current knowledge and "the threshold of indistinguishability." And advances in AI have been "glacial," Roese and Amir observe. They foresee a world, in 2060, in which robots "may have a conversational capacity slightly more complex than the automatic telephone services used by corporations today." Not quite the "Blade Runner" scenario some have feared.

We won't reach that vaunted threshold of indistinguishability for at least a century, Roese and Amir conclude. In the meantime, they say, psychologists have much to contribute to the creation of androids. This includes such small matters as teaching them how long they can stare at humans, and how close they can stand next to them, before the humans start to freak out.

Yes, that's about as far as these scholars' dystopian imaginations go: in the future, hyperintelligent androids might invade our personal space. Never let it be said we weren't warned.

One of the early paranoid criticisms of rock music was that its intense backbeat and general loudness had the effect of manipulating the listener's heartbeat. In the telling, this effect took on overtones of something like demonic possession.

Yamaha has a new product, the BODiBEAT, that revives the notion of music's ability to influence the pulsing of the heart, but this time it's a two-way street: the heart, too, affects what music you end up hearing. And the effect is being sold as benign.

Essentially, BODiBEAT is an Mp3 player with the ability to sort songs according to beats per minute, mated to a heartbeat monitor. As you ramp up the exertion in your exercise of choice, faster and faster songs play; as you cool down, the songs, too, mellow.

In marketing the device, Yamaha cites research finding that workouts are more endurable when they're supported with music of a similar intensity. But I'm of two minds here. On the one hand, what runner hasn't gotten up a hill with the help of some hard rock or Jay-Z? On the other, there's something vaguely creepy about this kind of mechanistic feedback. Don't true athletes achieve, or aspire to, a certain mental calm during even the most intense endeavors? Must every fast runner be listening to something frenetic? I'd like to think that some of the people blowing by me on the footpath, doing sub-six-minute miles, have soothing Beethoven adagios playing on their iPods. Or that they might even be listening to (imagine!) their own calm thoughts.

(Image via design mind)

So says Brink Lindsey, of the libertarian Cato Institute. And the denunciation only gets more fervent as he goes on.

After receiving complaints from Hindu groups, Burger King has withdrawn a small-scale print-advertising campaign it was using in Spain to draw attention to its "Texican Whopper."

The ad showed an image of Lakshmi, the multi-armed Hindu goddess of wealth, seemingly sitting astride one of the burgers, under the tag line "'La merienda es sagrada" ("the snack is sacred").

To be sure, beef is sacred to Hindus -- in the sense that they are forbidden to eat it. (Aside from the trademark "all-beef patty," the Texican Whopper includes chile con carne.)

After fielding complaints that it was blasphemous to suggest that Lakshmi would endorse beef-based fast food, Burger King canceled the campaign and apologized. (Now who should they apologize to for the name "Texican Whopper"?)

In other branding-disaster news, the Guardian reports that Russian and Nigerian officials may come to regret the name that they've chosen for a new joint gas company. I'm not sure I can print it here, which is not a good sign.

An awesome map: "Generic Names for Soft Drinks by County."

Why, I wonder, is Boston a partial holdout from the near-universal New England preference for "soda"? Simple demographic diversity?

(I don't get the "coke" thing at all.)

(Via Matthew Yglesias)

You've heard of those alarm clocks that roll off your side table, forcing you to chase them down? An alarm described (and videotaped) by reader "Kevin" at TechEBlog takes a more direct approach to solving the ever-vexing problem of the snooze button.

Kevin installed a "large air cylinder" and some sort of valve at the head of his bed. There's lots of visible tubing and wiring, and the whole thing is controlled via a computer. (He's a little stinting with the technical details.) But the result is unambiguous: at the appointed hour, the head of the bed begins pounding like a jackhammer. After a few jolts, the snoozer's mind surely shifts from sleep to survival. (The video is a must-see.)

The device's creator claims he's been waking up this way for years. Take that with a grain of salt. But if you're not like Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp, who claimed in a recent interview that she pops out of bed at 3 a.m. or so daily, then here's one option.

I could use one.

(Via Boing Boing)

Affirmative action, specifically the Supreme Court's backing of a bias complaint by white firefighters in New Haven, has dominated recent discussion of judicial issues. But several legal bloggers have noticed fresh contentiousness related to obscenity law brewing at the circuit-court level.

In 2006, Dwight Whorley, a deeply unsympathetic figure with a long history of convictions for possession of child pornography, was sentenced in Virginia to 20 years in prison. Authorities had found "lascivious" pictures of children on a computer he'd used at a state-managed center for job-seekers. They also found -- and here's where things get more contentious -- Japanese anime cartoons depicting sex between adults and children, and emails in which Whorley discussed his sexual fantasies (involving children) with friends. The various infractions added up to an unusually long sentence.

Whorley's bid to get his sentence reduced hit an apparent dead end last month, when 10 of 11 members of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals voted against having the full court rehear his case. But Whorley found a champion -- or, to be more precise, current obscenity law found an enemy -- in Judge Roger Gregory. Gregory found it ominous that his colleagues came close to equating anime with actual child porn, and, worse, that they would imprison a man for writing down his (admittedly depraved) fantasies. Of the charges that stemmed from the emails, Gregory wrote: "I am hard-pressed to think of a better modern day example of government regulation of private thoughts than what we have before us in this case: convicting a man for the victimless 'crime' of privately communicating his personal fantasies to other consenting adults."

Do you recognize this jovial mug? It is best known, writes the novelist and New Yorker staffer Ben Greenman, from its appearance in a second-rate 1939 Hollywood comedy entitled "No News from the Navy." The picture centers on an inveterate seaman forced by circumstance to remain on land. In its one memorable scene, a bit of Chaplinesque farce, the man tries to shave, using the cartoonish vessel as a shaving mug, but, unused to doing so on land, he can't keep his balance and lurches about amusingly. The mug, one critic has suggested, is "an oddly compelling focus of the film so long as it is onscreen, enormous in its diminutive size, menacing in its cheer." What's more, it was fashioned by a Belgian surrealist of some note. It appeared in that one film alone.

With that kind of back story, are you now tempted to buy what seemed, at first glance, like a mere tchotchke? Well, you can, via eBay! (Last I checked, it was going for $10:51.)

As it happens, however, the story is pure fiction. And that's the whole point of an arty exercise, The Significant Objects project, conceived by Joshua Glenn (former author of Brainiac), and Rob Walker, the "Consumed" columnist for the New York Times magazine. Intrigued by the question of how consumer goods -- things -- become the objects of intense, even libidinal, human desire, they picked up sundry seemingly trivial objets at yard sales and the like. Then they recruited noted writers, including Greenman, Kurt Andersen, Luc Sante, and Stewart O'Nan, to devise fanciful, evocative stories about what they'd collected.

"Invested with new significance by this fiction, the object should -- according to our hypothesis -- acquire not merely subjective but objective value," Glenn and Walker write.

So is it the intrinsic utility and beauty of a commodity that creates its value, or the stories we tell ourselves about them? We'll know shortly, at least in the case of one goofy, leering mug (and a "Sanka ashtray," cow creamer, and toy hot dog …).

There's no attempt to hoax eBay shoppers: the descriptions are clearly labeled as fiction. High bidders will receive the objects as well as printouts of the stories.

Hmm. That mug's menacing cheer is growing on me!

Here's how the math looked when Infinite Summer, an online effort to get as many people as possible to read David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, "Infinite Jest," from June 21 to August 21 September 22, got started: 1000 pages divided by 92 days = 75 pages a week. "No sweat," the organizers concluded, optimistically.

Well, June 21 has come and gone and the math is working against you. The sweat quotient has increased markedly. But it's not too late, and, what's more, if you still want to tackle Wallace's daunting text (the very opposite of the stereotypical beach read), you can draw on a surprisingly rich ecosystem that has sprung up around Infinite Summer: bloggers (including non-literary policy types like Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein), Twitterers, Facebook addicts, and Tumblrs alike are all urging one another on through DFW's doorstop of a book, trading thoughts as they go about its characters, structure, and those (in)famous proliferating and involuted footnotes.

Infinite Summer is the brainchild of Matthew Baldwin, a contributing writer to The Morning News and founder of the National Novel Reading Month. For that effort, Baldwin recruited friends (virtual and otherwise) to conquer a masterpiece each November -- "Catch-22" and "Lolita," for example. "Infinite Jest," he concluded, needed not a month but a full season.

Infinitesummer.org serves as home base for the techno-literary experiment, where Baldwin and three co-conspirators have been posting their own theories about the novel plus handy character i.d.'s and chapter summaries.

There are a few dissenters: Scott Eric Kaufman, at The Valve, said the project was "a little morbid," given DFW's suicide. And signal-to-noise is an issue for anyone sifting through all the commentary it has inspired. (Ezra Klein: "I'm a blogger. I like to get to the point. Wallace doesn't." Noted!)

Still, in an interview with the L.A. Times blog Jacket Copy, Baldwin offered a penetrating explanation of how reading the book communally might help him, and others too:

One thing I am already noticing about "Infinite Jest," even 60 pages in, is that it is an intensely claustrophobic novel. Much of the action takes place in small apartments, hospital wards and in the minds of the various protagonists. It's so overwhelming that it would be easy to close the novel with a shudder and never return. I think the knowledge that there are thousands of folks out there reading concurrently goes a long way toward leavening those feelings.

As journalists and cultural commentators debate whether, or how, in-depth, expensive reportage can be saved from the tsunami of blog culture, along comes Judge Richard Posner with a novel idea.

His proposal, however, which he floated recently on The Becker-Posner Blog, has received early reviews that make those for "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" sound enthusiastic.

After sketching the familiar present scene (newspaper revenue falling, media start-ups building online publications on the backs of links to print publication), Posner proposed a substantial expansion of copyright law:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from … impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations … [emphasis added]

The predominant reaction to the first part of the proposal was: if newspapers don't want people linking to them, then they shouldn't put their stuff on the Web (or they should demand payment to view it). Some newspapers do this, of course, at least for some content.

But the idea that a law could be written, in compliance with the First Amendment, forbidding even paraphrase of published material? That struck many readers as even more far-fetched.

The reaction of journalist Tom Scocca, at the Web site The Awl, was typical: "The idea of outlawing paraphrase is unbelievable. I mean, I actually cannot believe it. And I say this as someone who thinks HuffPo [a site with many links to newspapers] is a nest of thieves."

I only got around to reading Atul Gawande's remarkable New Yorker piece on disparities in health-care costs within the United States -- and even between different parts of Texas -- last week. I deserves all the buzz it's received.

I've heard the health-care expert Uwe Reinhardt, of Princeton, say that the phenomenon Gawande explores is the single most important fact to get one's head around in the health-care debate. What is Rochester, Minnesota doing right and towns like McAllen, Texas, where Gawande sets part of his story, doing wrong? (At the time, I jotted down the phrase "story idea" next to my notation of Reinhardt's observation. I guess I can cross that one off the "possibles" list, given that Gawande has produced a National Magazine Award contender.)

Gawande floats some speculative but persuasive theories about why some cities have particularly "expensive" cultures when it comes to health care, and how to change those cultures: he thinks doctors should work in problem-solving teams, for example, possibly under set salaries, and not as independent entrepreneurs.

When John Sperling, the founder of the for-profit University of Phoenix, was a child, his father used to beat him. The beatings stopped when Sperling was 10, after the boy threatened to kill his father in his sleep if the abuse continued.

When Sperling was 15, his father died of natural causes. "I raced outside, rolled in the grass squealing with delight …" Sperling has written. "I realized this was the happiest day of my life. It still is."

Sperling is now 88 and among the richest people in the world, having built the University of Phoenix, which is looked down upon by traditional academics, into a financial behemoth. Unsurprisingly, observes Thomas Bartlett in a thorough profile of the entrepreneur in the Chronicle of Higher Education [subscribers only], he is a fan of Dickens.

(One recent setback: Christopher Heward, a biologist whom Sperling hired to run the Kronos Longevity Research Institute, "whose original purpose was to treat well-to-do patients interested in not dying" but whose "only real patient" turned out to be Sperling himself, died this year.)

(Photo credit: Inc. magazine)

The New Republic film critic Stanley Kauffmann has been a welcome, consistent presence at the magazine in the 20-odd years that I've been a reader -- one of the few steady presences, as pundits have come and gone. Somewhat unbelievably, I could make this claim even if I were a subscriber since the late 1950s. To celebrate Kauffmann's half-century at the magazine, TNR has posted a series of video clips in which he discusses film, and his own writing -- and the brief interregnum in which Pauline Kael filled his place -- with the senior editor Ruth Franklin. Here he explains why he never gets bored with his job.

We tend to think of plastic as semi-permanent: Once in landfills, it can take eons to disintegrate. But modern artworks made of plastic, and seminal examples of design fashioned from the stuff, are falling apart at an alarming rate, reports Slate:

The casualty list is appalling: Antique plastic dolls at the National Museum of Denmark have begun to peel and flake; classic furniture at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London might as well have been left out in the sun for years; the first-ever plastic toothbrush, at the Smithsonian, is collapsing into a pile of crumbs; etc. A whole generation of irreplaceable items that are as representative of our culture as pottery or flintheads were of ancient ones are dying -- and many people charged with their care have no idea how to stop further damage.

We're losing the first-ever plastic toothbrush! (In fact, the issue is quite serious.)

(Image via Slate)

The Baffler, the magazine that punctured business cant and confronted the morally dubious aspects of the New Economy at a time when many publications and pundits were turning a blind eye (or were complicit in the bubble-inflation), is returning -- perhaps to say, "We told you so."

Thomas Frank, who started the magazine-cum-journal in 1988, last put out an issue in 2007. Before that, there had been a four-year hiatus. Frank's work for the Baffler led to the acclaimed, much-debated book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and he's currently a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

Frank recently told The New York Observer that he suspected there might be a fresh receptivity to the Baffler's take on things: "We developed this critique of consumer culture and business culture, and lo and behold, a lot of the things that we were saying, instead of being this out-there stuff from the fringes of self-publishing land -- it's stuff that I think will make sense to everybody nowadays," he said. "The world has come a lot closer to our way of seeing things. It's funny how obvious it is now!"

According to the Observer, writers whom Mr. Frank has recruited include the Hermenaut founder (and former Brainiac author) Joshua Glenn, the n+1 editor Mark Greif, the BookForum editor Chris Lehmann, and the University of Illinois at Chicago literature professor Walter Benn Michaels, author of "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Forget Inequality."

The Baffler used to have a notoriously loose publication calendar, with publication deadlines serving as rough targets. Frank says the editorial team has committed to a regular, twice-a-year schedule.

(Image via The New York Observer)

In Dissent, Michael Walzer writes that it is citizens who should be expressing resolute solidarity with the Iranian protesters: union members, human-rights activists, professors, students. But President Obama? He is doubtful:

Right now, the most important task of the U.S. government with regard to Iran is not regime change. The most important task is to persuade or coerce the Iranian government to give up the effort to produce nuclear weapons. Doing that will require some mix of toughness and conciliation -- and that necessary mix will still be necessary whoever actually won and whoever finally wins the Iranian election. What Obama says must be guided by what he has to do.

The rest of us are much freer.

Leon Wieseltier, however, in the New Republic, laments Walzer's "exemption of the president from moral leadership in the midst of one of the greatest explosions of democratic energy in our time." And he dismisses in a parenthetical the argument that for an American president to ally himself with the protesters might, in fact, be to do them a disfavor:

(I am not an Iran expert, unlike almost everyone I meet, but I find it hard to imagine that the young men and women suffering the blows of the Basij would not welcome our support, that they are in the streets with angry thoughts of Mossadegh. If these events have shown anything, it is that their enemy and our enemy are the same.)

But, of course, Walzer wishes to give them "our" support. And history did not stop with the toppling of Mossadegh. It continued on, as it tends to do, through the 1979 revolution, America's backing of Iraq against Iran in the 1980s, and that notorious John McCain ditty "Bomb, bomb, bomb / bomb, bomb Iran."

Is it really self-evident within Iran that the interests of Iranian dissidents and those of official Washington are aligned? I wonder.

UPDATE: Would the dissidents applaud this Op-ed piece, for example, written by someone who declares himself to be an ally of theirs? (It asks, or declares, "Time for an Israeli Strike?")

In a recent column at National Review Online, the economist Thomas Sowell argues that President Obama has done nothing to stop Iran from developing atomic weaponry. That's not a unique argument, but Sowell goes further. Granted, he says, Iran may only acquire a handful of nukes. But that may be all it needs:

Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender -- especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

I don't cherish the idea of my (hypothetical) granddaughters living under sharia, but, that said, I didn't gain much by pausing to ponder that scenario. But Sowell's column did make me think of a few questions that might inspire a lively discussion in, say, an eighth-grade history class:

Militarily speaking, what resources does the United States have, in 2009, that Japan did not have in 1945?

How might those options affect 1) Iran's decision to strike the U.S. with atomic weapons? Or 2) possible American responses to such an attack?

If Japan had possessed several thousand nuclear-tipped ICBMs in 1945, might that have affected the course of World War II? How?

Not long ago, Dinesh D'Souza, author of "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11," was nudged out of the Hoover Institution for making arguments that were long on Democrat-bashing and short on scholarship. It was decided that he was an embarrassment to Stanford University, where the think tank is based. Sowell is a far more credible figure, but this column, anyway, is D'Souza-level stuff.