Purchase of the day.

From the February 22, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans" [Hardcover] Ann Coulter (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.00)

Honorable mention:

Educational Products - SET Zimbabawe 10, 50, 100 Trillions Collection / Hyperinflation Money - (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.96)

... and 52 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — through the Althouse Amazon portal.

Althouse portal users: brainy, frugal, value-smart.

Thank you all who support this blog.

"59% Think Most School Textbooks Put Political Correctness Ahead of Accuracy."

A Rassmussen poll.

It’s important to note that the question did not define the phrase "politically correct." The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated,” and it has come to be understood by many as prohibiting critical comments about politically sensitive topics and groups....

Conservative voters are nearly twice as likely as liberals to think most textbooks put more emphasis on political correctness than on accuracy. Military veterans are more skeptical of those textbooks than those who have not been in uniform....

Of course, everyone actually wants a certain type or amount of political correctness in schoolbooks. They just tend to think of the term "political correctness" when they picture their political opponents  inserting ideology that they think doesn't belong. Conservatives want the Founding Fathers to be presented in a favorable light, and they may want to soft-pedal the downside of industrialization and to stress individualism, optimism, and opportunity.

Anybody putting together a schoolbook has to think about inspiring children and building ideals and character. I'm saying that even though I lean strongly in the direction of straightforward, factual information, and I think that it's a serious moral wrong to use compulsory education to indoctrinate children.

"When it came to loving..."

"He knew which Daisy to pick!"



More here.

Purchases of the days.

From the February 19 and 20, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

(13 copies) "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" [Kindle Edition] Susan Cain (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $11.06)

(11 copies) "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" [Kindle Edition] Susan Cain (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $10.19)

... and 164 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — all of which convey the quiet, contemplative, good-listener message to the blogger that... shhh... shhh... shhh...

Thank you.

Cass Sunstein reviews "Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism."

That's a book by Sarah Conly, published by Cambridge University Press. 206 pages, $95. $95! Fortunately, we cannot be coerced to buy that. I will exercise my autonomy and refrain from buying it. I'll just read Sunstein, for free, here.

[A] significant strand in American culture appears to endorse the central argument of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty....

the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.

Sunstein refers to social science research that shows people actually aren't very good at making decisions for themselves. We have "present bias" (and don't pay enough attention to the future), we're bad at assessing probability, and we're "unrealistically optimistic."

Until now, we have lacked a serious philosophical discussion of whether and how recent behavioral findings undermine Mill’s harm principle and thus open the way toward paternalism. Sarah Conly’s illuminating book Against Autonomy provides such a discussion....

To Mill’s claim that individuals are uniquely well situated to know what is best for them, Conly objects that Mill failed to make a critical distinction between means and ends. True, people may know what their ends are, but sometimes they go wrong when they choose how to get them....

If the benefits justify the costs, she is willing to eliminate freedom of choice, not to prevent people from obtaining their own goals but to ensure that they do so....

A natural objection is that autonomy is an end in itself and not merely a means. On this view, people should be entitled to choose as they like, even if they end up choosing poorly. In a free society, people must be allowed to make their own mistakes, and to the extent possible learn from them, rather than facing correction and punishment from bureaucratic meddlers. Conly responds that when government makes (some) decisions for us, we gain not only in personal welfare but also in autonomy, if only because our time is freed up to deal with what most concerns us....

 As for Sunstein himself, he prefers a softer form of government manipulation, described in the article and in his book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

"I was on board the chopper with the door off — our pilot flew in nice and close to the top of the spire and hovered there for about 5 seconds as I stepped OFF, yes, stepped off..."

"...and onto the top of the rock which is only about 2 sq ft. Our director was holding my arm from inside the chopper as I stepped out to the rock — where our safety guy (who had climbed to the top – that’s right – climbed) grabbed my other arm to make sure I didn’t fall off the 125 ft rock and down to the ocean below."

Jeff Probst describes how they got that shot that begins the opening sequence in the new season of "Survivor." It disturbed me to see him there, and the video — here — of how he got there is scary too.

And here's that book "Stranded" that Probst wrote with a co-author – a novel for kids about kids stranded on an island.

Purchase of the day.

From the February 15, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"Dog in Charge" [Hardcover] K. L. Going (Author), Dan Santat (Illustrator) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.02)

... and 79 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers. Commerce!

Purchase of the day.

From the February 14, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

"Bats - Creatures of the Night" (All Aboard Reading: Level 2: Grades 1-3) [Paperback] Joyce Milton (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $0.60)


(image from Wikimedia Commons)

... and 55 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — that all together put a lovely smile on the blogger's beautiful face.  Many thanks!

Ronald Dworkin — a giant among law professors — has died.

He was 81.

His legal arguments were subtly presented applications to specific problems of a classic liberal philosophy which, in turn, was grounded in his belief that law must take its authority from what ordinary people would recognise as moral virtue....

Perhaps Dworkin's greatest achievement was his insistence on a rights-based theory of law, expounded in his first and most influential book, Taking Rights Seriously (1977), in which he proposed an alternative both to Hart's legal positivism and to the newly minted theories of the Harvard philosopher of law John Rawls....

He remained an unapologetic, indeed proud, liberal Democrat, unshaken in his loyalty to the New Deal tradition set by his hero Franklin D Roosevelt, even as such ideas became less and less widely held. It is possible that this shifting of the political centre of gravity under him deprived him of a more prominent career as a public intellectual.

Read the whole thing. Click on the Dworkin tag to see what we were saying about him while he was alive.

When I went to law school beginning in 1978, at NYU — where Dworkin taught — nothing was taken more seriously than "Taking Rights Seriously." That was just before the outburst that was Critical Legal Studies, in a time and a place where we were expected to believe that rights were real. Shame on you if you suspected they were inventions of judges.

"My name is Emily Bazelon. I’m a feminist. I’ve never read Betty Friedan’s book—until now."

Says Emily Bazelon (on the occasion of the 50-year anniversary of "The Feminine Mystique").

I'd never read the book myself until recently. My reason for not reading it was that I'd regarded it as something that addressed the troubles of my parents' generation. I went to college in 1969, when everyone was reading "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch." "The Feminine Mystique" seemed really old fashioned — about June Cleaver and her cohort.

Here's Bazelon:

[W]hat hit me was Betty’s howl of frustration. It’s primal, and you feel its desperate force on almost every page. God, did she feel trapped among the slipcovers of the suburbs and in the pages of the women’s magazines she wrote for, where big ideas and questions were entirely unwelcome. The only way to escape was to pulverize the image of the Happy Housewife Heroine who is the title of Chapter 2. Betty’s fiercest critique in this book is of the “mistaken choice” she thinks traditional gender roles forced middle-class women and their husbands to make....

What made me dislike the book — when I finally read it — was that Freidan was not in the role of the housewives she purported to understand so well. She was in the role of writing for women's magazines. She didn't like the limited topics that were the stuff of that kind of magazine. She makes an assumption that women who buy a magazine are only interested in the topics covered by that magazine. But that's absurd! If you bought a magazine about cooking/childcare/fashion, that wouldn't mean you aren't interested in politics or science or whatever else is supposed to be more important. You might have other magazines — or books — for that.

Why the assumption? It might be frustrating for a journalist who's interested in politics to crank out material about topics she doesn't care about, but it was wrong to project those frustrations onto the unknown women who bought the magazines for their own purposes and used the information in those magazines in their individual private lives — perhaps to make a nice dinner efficiently so there would be time to read a good book in the extra time one can make in a day when you don't have a job. The notion that A Job belongs at the center of everyone's life is a huge scam, and the blithe rejection of the 1-earner marriage was an amazing, tragic shift in American culture. The equality of women — the ambition and the fulfilment of women — did not demand that we all get a job.

"The world’s most experienced penis reattachment surgeons can be found in Thailand..."

"... where, during the 1970s, an estimated one hundred vengeful Thai wives, spurred by media coverage of a prominent 1973 case, sliced off the penises of their adulterous husbands as they slept. When a suitably equipped microsurgeon was on hand to reattach the errant appendage, the men were able to resume philandering within a matter of months. Though probably with reduced success: The penises, though operative, were shorter, numb, and often only partway erectable. The most serious complication, in the Thai attacks, was infection. Two of the wives flushed the penises down the toilet, forcing their husbands to grope for their lost manhood inside the septic tank. (Incredibly, both were found, cleaned, cleaned some more, and reattached.) More commonly, the women would hurl the penis out the window. In the cases described in 'Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam,' all the recovered penises were 'grossly contaminated.' Better that than eaten by livestock. Many rural Thai homes are elevated on pilings, with the family’s pigs, chickens, and ducks tending to mill about seeking shade in the space underneath. It is not, oddly, the pigs, but rather the ducks, that the castrated Thai must worry about. The paper does not provide the exact number of penises eaten by ducks, but the author says there have been enough over the years to prompt the coining of a popular saying: 'I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat.'"

I'm reading "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex," by Mary Roach.

Purchase of the day.

Yesterday, February 8. "What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster" [Kindle Edition] Jonathan V. Last (Author) (Earnings to Althouse blog = $0.90)

P.J. O’Rourke quipped of this book: "A powerful argument that the only thing worse than having children is not having them. I'm reading What To Expect When No One's Expecting aloud to the three little arguments for birth control at my house in hope they'll quit squabbling and making messes and start acting so cute that all my neighbors decide to conceive."

Thank you to all who used the Althouse portal yesterday to make a total of 60 purchases and caused the blogger to think, they like me... they really like me!

At the Cool Edge Café...

... everything is clearly defined.

(You can buy that book here. And here are some compact Nikon binoculars.)

ADDED: Some commenters are saying they'd prefer binoculars with image stabilization. Here are Nikon StabilEyes Marine Binoculars. Expensive! Here are some cheaper Canon ones.

"I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care."

"Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out 'Is he as crazy as I am?' I don’t need that question answered."

That's a quote from Philip Roth, which I read just now on rereading one of the books I'd be most inclined to keep if I pared my book-books down to the minimum — "The Writer's Desk." I was going to type out the quote, but I tried Googling roth oates habits and found a whole interview surrounding it — from 1984.

Here's an interview with Jill Krementz, the photographer whose work is collected in the book. My favorite writer-and-desk in the book this one of E.B. White.

Let me see your workspace.

Lots of links to photos, collected in a Metafilter post, but the links all go to LinkedIn, and there's some serious hostility to LinkedIn for spamming us all these years. And it's not just that....

I'd be happy if they'd just get rid of the "influencers". It seems as if they had deliberately set out to make a list of the most annoying, unselfconscious people on Earth. I mean, which other list manages to contain the globular egos of David Cameron, Deepak Chopra, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and Martin Varsavsky, a.o.?

If you want to see the workspaces of some admirable people, I love this book, "Writer's Desk," with excellent photographs by Jill Krementz (who was married to Kurt Vonnegut) and an introductory essay by John Updike.

And here's what my desk looks like right now:


(Partial view, with snow.)

ADDED: What's with "a.o." in the blockquote above? Is this another call for me to check Urban Dictionary?

A.O.    7 up, 3 down
Stands for Accidental Ownage. When someone shows off and fails, or something like that.

Dude, this guy was trying to do a handstand on a rail and he flipped over.
Whoa, that's total A.O.

Cissy Houston's harsh memoir about her daughter Whitney Houston...

... may have something of a homophobic theme. I read the linked article because it's linked at Drudge: "CISSY DISSY: Whitney Houston's Mom Writes Unflinching Memoir..." The article characterizes the book, but all the interesting material comes from interviews that have been available for a while, so the article might not represent the book accurately. ("Nippy" = Whitney.)

Houston moved out of the family home an into an apartment with her friend Robyn Crawford at age 18. Crawford was gay, and Cissy did not like her. “What made Nippy’s move particularly hard for me was her decision to room with Robyn Crawford in an apartment in Woodbridge, New Jersey. She knew how I felt about Robyn, but she was determined to live with her anyway. It wasn’t that there was serious tension between Robyn and me— we just didn’t see eye to eye. Still, we tried to be respectful of each other and of our places in Nippy’s life, and we figured out how to give each other the necessary space. We had our love for Nippy in common, and though we rarely agreed, we were at least able to keep things from being too uncomfortable when we were all together.”

Later Crawford moved with Whitney into her big mansion in Mendham, New Jersey. “Early on, Robyn Crawford nicknamed me “Big Cuda”— short for barracuda— and that suited me just fine. The name stuck, and from then out, whenever I’d be coming somewhere to see Nippy, people would warn each other that Big Cuda was coming.”

But it was Crawford who had the guts to tell Cissy about Whitney’s drug problems early on, long before Bobby Brown arrived on the scene.

Seems like it's Crawford who has the interesting memoir material.

Lorrie Moore is leaving the University of Wisconsin.

A sad day for us!

She came here in 1984 — the same year I did — back when "Self-Help" was still a manuscript.

Purchase of the (yester)day.

"Intellectuals and Society": Revised and Expanded Edition [Paperback] Thomas Sowell (Amazon Associates earnings to the blog: $1.06). Maybe we should start a Thomas Sowell book club. Someone near and dear made me happy by sending me this book for Christmas. Thanks to everyone who used the Althouse Amazon portal.

"Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief."

A new book, given an excellent review in WaPo, here:

“Going Clear” starts with exactly the right questions: “What is it that makes the religion alluring? What do its adherents get out of it? How can seemingly rational people subscribe to beliefs that others find incomprehensible?” And in his early chapters, [Lawrence] Wright implicitly draws parallels between this religion and those with which readers may be more familiar.

Scientology is, in its components, a stew of traditional religious concepts. There’s immortality, transcendence, salvation and ethics. There are rituals as well as ritual punishments. There’s a founder, or a prophet, mediating capital-T truth for the people and transcribing it in books and pamphlets that serve as scripture. All this is wrapped up in a package that, while not recognizably Christian, or Buddhist, or Freudian, or Jungian, or occult, has elements of all.

Wright knows that crazy-seeming religious beliefs and practices are not, in themselves, sinister or evil....

"I always start with physicality when I’m writing as a woman. So I always have a vagina and think about having periods."

Said Will Self, who has a new novel, "Umbrella," the title of which is based on the Joyce quote "A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."

By the way, the first appearance of the word "umbrella" in English, according to the OED (not linkable), came in 1611:

T. Coryate Crudities sig. Lv,   Many of them doe carry other fine things.., which they commonly call in the Italian tongue vmbrellaes... These are made of leather something answerable to the forme of a little cannopy & hooped in the inside with diuers little wooden hoopes that extend the vmbrella in a prety large compasse.

That predates the first use of "vagina," which was in 1682:

T. Gibson Anat. Humane Bodies 20   It has passages..for the neck of the Bladder, and in Women for the vagina of the Womb.

The etymology of "vagina" is: "Latin vāgīna sheath, scabbard." The etymology of "umbrella" is: "Italian ombrella and ombrello, < ombra < Latin umbra shade."

Here's Perry Como singing "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella."

Fill in the blank: Let a smile be your umbrella. Let a _________ be your vagina.