• FREE SPEECH DEPT.

    A Bad Remedy For Bad Climate Speech, Again

    A few months ago I complained that New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman and other state Attorneys General appeared to be starting a campaign to intimidate climate skeptics and/or deniers under the guise of investigating ExxonMobil. Now comes news of a counterattack: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) has issued congressional subpoenas for Schneiderman and… Read more

  • POLITICAL SCIENCE DEPT.

    What if Donald Trump is a Sociopath?

    What if Donald Trump is a sociopath? It’s obvious to me that Donald Trump is a very dangerous person who should not under any circumstances be given power over other people. It’s also obvious that his supporters don’t see him that way. It’s tempting to dismiss them as intolerant bigots — and he certainly has… Read more

  • LIFESTYLE DEPT.

    More About Life In the New Home

    My wife and I like our new home a lot, but after 25 years of living together in a condo, a ranch house takes some getting used to. It’s big. Not that anyone would mistake it for a mansion, but compared to how we’ve been living, it’s really big. The cats are loving all the… Read more

  • LEGAL DEPT.

    A Verdict of Innocence?

    Over at Fault Lines, Andrew Fleischman has a post about the idea of letting a jury determine actual innocence. It’s an interesting post — worth a read — but when I read the headline I thought of something a bit different. Criminal defense attorneys complain about the difficulty of getting a jury to understand the… Read more

  • HOME OWNERSHIP DEPT.

    The Bouquet Of My New Suburban Life

    I’m still recovering from my move to the new house. It turns out that packing all your stuff into boxes and then trying to reassemble it back into a working life is really time-consuming. I keep running into problems like wanting to put a piece of furniture together, which would be a lot easier with… Read more