Glenna's Blog

Jeffrey Eugenides in the New Yorker:

“There was something creepy about one guy’s face––it was like a baby’s face that had hideously aged”

A guy is an aged baby, so this sentence is just a lengthy version of “one guy had a hideous face.”

“disastrously Pyrrhic”

“The bullet tore through the little girl’s head and neck. Sadly, she could not be saved.”

Mr. Blow, you should have said “disastrously, she could not be saved.”

“bisexual leanings”

The New Republic talking about Katherine Mansfield. That magazine literally can’t string two words together.

When news outlets run stories about government figures, they can either display an official-type photo of the person or a random one. Potential Supreme Court nominee and arguable lesbian Elena Kagan has a nice pic on her office’s website (there are also flattering candids out there), but blogs keep using horrible shots whenever they’re speculating about whether she’s a lesbian—including supposedly pro-gay sites [New York][Slate][Queerty]. It seems like they’re using imagery instead of English to say: “she must be a lesbian, look how ugly she is!”

To counteract the media’s ugly lesbian stereotype, here is a beautiful picture of a lesbian:

There is a new book out that blames World War I on the idiocy and cloisteredness of Europe’s monarchs. When I saw that the WSJ had reviewed it, I thought, “har har, I bet the reviewer was offended by its criticism of conservative authority figures.” I was correct.

The reviewer scorns the “popular mythology” that an arms race made war in Europe inevitable “unless power could be wrested in time from the crowned heads who so ill-deserved it.” His alternative arguments are not compelling. For example, he believes that “it was not the fact of an arms race that produced World War I but rather Germany’s unwillingness to rest until it had won that race.” Don’t all races involve contestants who are unwilling to rest?

Anyway, I can’t complain about newspapers having political biases. That’s normal. But do they have to be so formulaic about it? I can’t predict Gossip Girl plot twists; I should not be able to guess how random reviewers will feel about history books I haven’t read.

Savor this moment. Think about where you are so that you can tell your children one day. Because legal history is being made. Just like judicial activism defined the baby boomers’ constitutional vision, judicial transparency will define ours. And it’s all thanks to huffy op-eds that were published this weekend.

The anti-gay side in Perry v. Schwarzenegger didn’t want the trial webcast and the gay side did. The Supreme Court sided with the anti-gays, so now liberal journalists are refuting its argument. And instead of dissecting the logic of the ruling, they’re lashing out against the entire concept of shrouded judging.

The Atlantic: “why can’t the American people watch what our biggest and most important judges do at work?” Slate: “the Supreme Court’s decision to stay the broadcast […] betrays a deep ambivalence about the same humble American voter whose very rights the court purports to be defending.” LA Times: “If matters of social change are going to be debated in the courts, we all should get to view the process — and, through our reactions, to participate in it.”

Just last week the “cameras in the courts” movement was a populist idea that the populace didn’t care about. Stuck. But because the Supreme Court’s recent anti-camera ruling just happened to hurt Team Liberal, now the Liberals are pro-camera. Judicial transparency has found a constituency which blogs.

Brown v. Board was about racial equality but sparked a war over “judicial activism.” The gay marriage case looks similar: a cultural issue inspiring pundits to pay attention to a totally different legal theory issue. I’m psyched. The conservative justices probably ruled against the cameras because they are grossed out by gays. Now they’ll have to defend judicial elitism—their lifestyle, the cornerstone of their identity!—nonstop for the rest of their lives.

From Slate’s review of Joshua Ferris’s The Unnamed, here’s a paragraph that ends in a lie:

Tim never felt hemmed in by his desk job. He never pined for escape. Instead, he was a model office-dweller. As such, he was a model 21^st-century American—too busy to worry about his role in the universe or other philosophical concerns, and content to think of the “physical world” as the room beyond the monitor. Happy just to flap his arms around an electric sensor. He’s limited, faintly pathetic, and eminently recognizable.

No, that man is not recognizable, except from novels. In real life I have never met a model office-dweller. Everyone I know worries philosophically because that’s what happens when people worry for more than thirty-five seconds. Nobody is happy. Even house cats pine for escape, but they fear eating mice every day will become even more tedious than fancy feast, the flavors of which rotate.

But most people don’t publish their angst, so writers depict them as faintly pathetic.

The Times editorial board shakes its head at the antics of Goldman Sachs today. “Goldman pledged $500 million over five years — crumbs from its table — to help 10,000 small businesses. It is hard to take seriously Goldman’s claim that the program was not motivated by its public relations problems.”

Goldman is a corporation, not a person. Expecting a corporation to show remorse is like expecting a person to delegate all her moral judgments to a Board of Directors. Corporations are supposed to make money, not judgments, and if they did then we’d live in a world where graphing calculators won American Idol and naps were illegal.

If the Times editorial board is angry with Goldman, they should actually try to shrink its power by arguing that:

1. corporations shouldn’t enjoy the same legal rights as people
2. there should be higher taxes on corporations, financial services, and rich people
3. investment banking has a lot in common with pedophilia
4. Congress should pass tighter regulation of securities and looser securities fraud statutes
5. Naomi Klein is the perfect antidote to Sarah Palin. Klein/Nader 2012!

This image has probably been photoshopped by Kennedy’s office.

Last week we learned that when Justice Kennedy speaks to prep schools, he requires the student reporters to get his approval on their stories before publishing them. Now we learn that he does the same thing to college kids. At GWU, he insisted that a reporter change a quote from “it’s” to the more patrician “it is.” That’s good. If the American public believed its judges elocuted casually, the legitimacy of the Court would be undermined.

With his narcissistic censor jobs Kennedy reminds me of those Disney actresses who race off to pose naked and make a sex tape on their 16th birthday. It’s legal and everything but also it makes the world a worse place. Hey famous people, kids look up to you! Express your true self—whether that be a skank or a duke—in some way that doesn’t insult the First Amendment.

(Insulting the First Amendment is awesome when you do it on historical or sociolegal grounds, but egomania by itself doesn’t add to the collective wisdom.)

Lately I keep hearing people throw around the term “fact check” in a smug way. Jon Stewart “fact checked” Sean Hannity; Justice Kennedy was within his rights to “fact check” a high school newspaper story. Apparently the term “fact checking” is a sacred cow—that’s why people are tempted to use it incorrectly, as in both those instances. They sound ridiculous to me, because I know fact checking doesn’t matter.

(Disclosure: I worked as a pro bono fact checker for four months and did not enjoy it.)

There are two types of people who influence policy in this country. The first group is experts. Experts get their info by reading academic articles and researching their own. They rely less on newspapers to form policy; when they do, they check up on the data themselves.

The second group of people who influences policy is idiots. Idiots write handwritten letters to their Senators and idiots boycott and protest. And idiots believe what they want to believe. No matter how many facts a fact checker checks, idiots will misunderstand all of them.

The remainder of the population, including you and me, has zero influence over policy. For us, newspapers are entertainment. A serious form of entertainment, certainly; more cerebral than playing pinball, graver than watching Glee. But still, entertainment. We feel more satisfied—more entertained—if we believe the newspapers we read are factual. But if they’re not perfectly factual, either we’ll never know, we’ll let it slide, or we’ll switch to another form of entertainment.

The New York Times could tell us that Goldman Sachs pays Osama bin Laden’s medical bills, unemployment just fell to 4% thanks to a benevolent Wal-Mart hiring drive, and Barack Obama had an abortion. It wouldn’t matter.

Not earnest.

Slate reviews Glee today:

The show is eager to offend, and on the other hand, it flaunts good morals—hard work and collective struggle and all that. It has its earnestness and spits its sarcasm, too.

No. Hard work and collective struggle pay off for the characters within such an absurd context that you know in reality, the results would be the opposite (for example, in real life a tiny gay boy would not become a football hero by leading the offense in dance before a crucial play). It’s a 100% nihilistic show.

If you’re looking for an earnest story, read or watch something perverse. The darkest storytellers are often the most obsessed by morality and injustice—Bret Easton Ellis, Houellebecq, Celine. The bad behavior they depict is meant to represent our society’s real behavior taken to the extreme, in order to shock the audience into reflection, and the material disgustingness comes from the author’s moral disgust.

Image control: keeps the justices looking good.

Under what ontology does changing quotations to “better reflect the meaning the justice had intended to convey” count as “fact checking”?

How come supreme court justices visit the Dalton School (NY) but not South Kingstown High School (RI)?

Was the newspaper’s faculty advisor, who said he “believed we could not publish anything without the approval of Justice Kennedy,” chosen for his post because he likes to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable?

“Editors at The Daltonian either would not comment for this article or did not respond to requests for an interview” because all teenage journalists in 2009 dream of becoming supreme court clerks?

Does Kennedy’s refusal to answer students’ questions signal agreement with Clarence Thomas’s theory that dialogue does not illuminate complex issues?

Why are America’s most verbal government officials so bad at explaining themselves?

Some people decorate their houses creatively; some people make money creatively; some people aren’t creative at all. NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman thinks that in our exciting new economy, only those in the second camp will be able to eat—and he seems to be cool with this. Sure, not all of us are superstar hustlers, but that’s just because we have bad educations. If public schools start teaching “entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity” then wealth disparity will melt.

What inspired Friedman to blame poverty on uncreativeness?

“A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained.”

Another interesting factoid about laid off lawyers: lots of them are recent graduates who would’ve been laid off plus punched in the face if they’d told a partner that they wanted to change how he practiced law.

I guess the Friedmanian solution is to start our own firm. Clients will love us because we’re cheap, we tweet, and our memory of Introduction to American Legal History is way sharper than those old experienced guys’.

Or here’s a less dangerous idea: since America is wealthy but there’s not a lot of work to go around, we should distribute the wealth according to some other metric besides work. Niceness, maybe, or funniness. And we should give everyone a few sandwiches per day just for being themselves.

UPDATE: here’s an anti-Friedman rant from a lawyer who survived layoffs at her firm. She refuses “to fall into the trap of blaming all the people who had to lose their jobs to justify my own privileged position[.]”