Wolcott Gibbs is practically unknown today, except to that small and no doubt dwindling band who know a great deal about the early days of the New Yorker. Founder/editor Harold Ross once told James Thurber “There wasn’t anything the three of you [Gibbs, Thurber, and E.B. White] couldn’t do. You could have got the magazine…
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The Mind of Ross
Ross Douthat, whom I sometimes like to call Ross Dumbfuck,* leaves off caterwauling about the possibility that the Republican Party will abandon its “abortion is murder” mantra (which does not, of course, imply that women who get abortions are murderers) to say what needed, so much, to be said about … Adrian Grenier: Sometimes I…
If it walks like a kangaroo
In the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin has an article on Guantánamo that tries very hard to sound even-handed, pumping only slightly for a proposal from Georgetown law professor and former Clinton Administration official Neal Katyal and Harvard law professor and former Bush Administration official Jack Goldsmith, which “is attracting a great deal of attention in…
Shorter Roberts Supreme Court: Let’s Make A Deal!
Originalist sin, anyone? The Volokh Conspiracy’s David Post has the scoop: Case or Controversy Requirement? What Case or Controversy Requirement?. As Dave points out, in a post that is, I would say, “thorough”, two of the many “big” decisions handed down by the Supreme Court in its recently concluded “summer session”—Moore v. Harper, shooting down…
CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.
OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…
A Limo at Risk, Part I: A skeptical view of American education reform, 1983-2017
(Author’s note: In the spring of 1996 I began to work as an editor/writer for a newly created non-profit called the “Education Statistics Services Institute,” whose sole function was to support the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education. I was assigned work on the National Assessment of Educational Progress,…
Democrats hold a Tea Party
From all accounts, Democrats in the House of Representatives are delirious over their defiance of decorum, their recent all-nighter on the House floor, where they pushed the envelope to the extent of shouting down House Speaker Paul Ryan, perhaps the most pummeled personage in the history of this blog. Well, I have a hard time…
What Hath Trump Wrought?
Which is more decadent, Donald Trump or the Annual Gala of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York? Okay, trick question, because there is no wrong answer. But putting the Donald in perspective does take some work. Yet the sources of the Donald aren’t hard to find: the stumblings and…
Yeah, she’s a Romney
Speaking in Stamford, Connecticut, Mitt’s missus said the following: “I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids.” Of course, she didn’t mean that she’s glad that some mothers have to work. She “meant” “I…
SNTNY!
If you can’t handle intense, one-of-a-kind humor, go here. “Yes, we are having guests for dinner. But you won’t be dining with us.” “You’re the ones who should be worried. I hear that, these days, they’re all gay.” “If you won’t help me find Flossie, I know people who will. Cat people, just like me.”…