James Fallows Tierney

No joke, this is how years of Ancestry.com memberships are going to pay off for my family.

"It's pissing people off": Older Dems are sick of hearing about "generational change" "I have no idea why this is the year to write this story, except that Joe Biden was old."

Miss me with the geriatrics complaining about having to defend their seats when they’re clearly not meeting the moment. No patience for this shit. www.axios.com/2026/03/06/h...

Fugazi/albini

Well look at this: Fugazi is releasing the sessions they did with Steve Albini. The band junked the work and re-recorded what would become In on the Killtaker. Very curious to hear this artifact.

a man in a suit and tie is smiling in front of a window with the word queen on it ALT: a man in a suit and tie is smiling in front of a window with the word queen on it

So I bought a wood chipper

DEMOCRATIC BACKSLIDING AND THE LIMITS OF FIRST AMENDMENT LEGALISM 17 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. ___ (forthcoming) Jacob M. Schriner-Briggs* The second Trump administration has unleashed a wave of repressive activity targeting civil society’s most prominent institutions: news media, universities, law firms, and more. Political scientists have responded to these episodes with warnings of “democratic backsliding” while legal scholars invoke the same phenomena as proof that the freedom of speech is in “crisis.” This Article begins by bridging these diagnoses, arguing that the United States’s crisis of free speech is best understood as but one important dimension of its ongoing crisis of democracy. Given this understanding, the Article’s primary contribution is to assess whether the First Amendment, interpreted and implemented by courts, can secure free speech against an executive branch intent on suppressing it. While the First Amendment has supported important rulings against the administration, the Article’s basic conclusion is that reformers seeking to unwind the speech crisis must ultimately look beyond it. Though First Amendment doctrine can slow down an overtly censorious government, it suffers from major blind spots the second Trump administration has routinely exploited. Moreover, even when litigants are able to press First Amendment claims, the administration has engaged in “legalistic noncompliance,” strategies that frustrate lower court proceedings and which have frequently been countenanced by the Roberts Court. The legalism of doctrine and courts can serve speech-protective functions. Yet the crisis at hand, itself downstream from an anti-democratic politics, must be met with responses forged through democratic processes and implemented by democratic institutions. The best long-term hopes for free speech, in other words, lie more in democratic politics than constitutional law.

"Democratic Backsliding and the Limits of First Amendment Legalism" is forthcoming in the U.C. Irvine Law Review. I hope to have it SSRN-ready by the end of April. If you'd like to take a look beforehand, let me know. Comments welcome!

Oh nice the thing I worry about every single time I walk across a city grate happened.

Unfortunately, “Yo brother, legal team confirmed we can’t work with minors rn” is an instant classic

Brb asking Claude code to set up this model

This is a monkeys paw idea

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

When I get the Chicago Tribune’s Daywatch newsletter by email I start hearing the Baywatch theme song

OK, I've seen enough.

I suggest that anyone interested in the sharp comments I've had about some of the anti-LPE movement pieces in the UChicago LR to simply read and compare the pieces by LPE scholars to those of their critics. It's astonishing.

Go here: lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archiv...

The anti LPE pieces are so laughably bad that you have to wonder whether the editors were secretly stacking the deck against the L&E position.

A medical journal says the case reports it has published for 25 years are, in fact, fiction A Canadian journal has issued corrections on 138 case reports it published over the last 25 years to add a disclaimer: The cases described are fictional. Paediatrics & Child Health, the journal…

wait wait WHAT? Apparently a "medical journal" in canada has been publishing fictionalized case reports for decades without indicating to its readers that they were fictionalized... retractionwatch.com/2026/03/03/c...

Ah, yes, the invaluable wisdom of the markets.

this is not an amount of money any individual or household should be able to have and we have to abolish both billionaires as a group and the economic system that makes them possible

Some even have allergies.

Do none of you typeset your briefs in LaTeX?

*ducks*

Glad it works for you because phew the manual periods would wreck me

Your lawyering work, essential as it is, is sometimes inscrutable

Can you say why you think this is a good use of a prediction market when vote counts aren’t yet available? Isn’t it betting based on vibes?

My wife and kids have more immediate ancestry by descent so they go first.

Again, looking forward to being part of a new diaspora

Love this FT graphic on Strait of Hormuz flow.

(Note: likely understates flow because this will not capture tankers who are making the run with their transponders turned off—and, tbh, if I was making the run I wouldn't want my transponder on)

I dictate email responses while driving, walking to the train, walking the dog, etc.

Would you believe if I told you the dean’s email job was maybe even worse?

incredible, he did the joke

Every community has its horrors, unfortunately. I grew up in Boston, which among other things did not have a more enlightened history of harbor prison camps