First of all, the verb “incent.” I heard it first last week and I became infatuated. It’s obnoxious, callous, bastardized, and artificial. The English language molded into plastic, the thick, stiff kind of plastic used to print credit cards. It’s… Continue Reading
Prof. Orin Kerr notes an interesting dissent in a criminal procedure case in which the Supreme Court denied certiorari, Pennsylvania v. Dunlap. It’s written by Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justice Kennedy, and it is not notable for its legal… Continue Reading
This phrase may soon change its meaning. “Lipstick on a pig” was a colloquialism to mean “spin” or unsuccessfully trying to put a good face on a very bad situation. It is turning into verbal shorthand for “insincere but politically… Continue Reading
Via Long Tail, a reminder of an interesting quote from Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission: It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to… Continue Reading
A little bit more than half of all NAPP readers are very, very down on the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate. Certainly, for liberals and other critics of the McCain campaign, she is the gift that… Continue Reading
I had a wonderful, historically-rich, and melancholy post all written and teed up for publication yesterday. I started it with the medieval-period emergence of Tibet, traced it through the fall of the Chinese Emperors, the autonomous period that ended in… Continue Reading
One of the really great things about the Federalist Society is its ability to put together discussions that fairly, intelligently, and civilly represent both sides of a contentious issue. Federalist Society debaters do not call one another names, do not… Continue Reading
I never made it through The Gulag Archipelago. After about 400 pages, I said to myself, “I get it. This is one kind of torture and abuse after another; it is just plain never, ever going to end.” But the… Continue Reading
It occurs to me that my earlier thoughts about opt-out organ harvesting laws may be, in a significant way, fundamentally incompatible with my thoughts in the same post condemning laws forbidding the sale of one’s own organs. This disturbs me… Continue Reading
I’ve long noticed and been bemused by the tendency of Southern Californians, myself included, to refer to freeways with the definite article preceding the assigned highway number, as in “The 405” or “The 10.” Elsewhere in the country, people refer… Continue Reading