Abigail

So proud of my beautiful wife!

(It was one of the best classes I took and the sole African history class available to undergrads.)

I did a class on colonialism in Africa at Oxford and at one point (more than a month in, so we had already done some brutal readings) the instructors had to spend half an hour explaining that the point of the class was that colonialism had been bad.

Also, how else do you handle the elaborate network of family feuds that makes you significantly closer to like you third cousin once removed than your actual uncle.

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the world had to know!!

-"I make minimum wage and it's not great...I can't say I'm never tempted...there's like $250k directly in front of me"

At this point I had to hang up because I had been on for five minutes without being able to ask a single question (all of this was completely unprompted!) and Boris was yelling.

-apologizes for it being loud because "there's just a lot of cash floating around here."
-man with heavy russian accent come in and yells several times to "count faster."
-I'm told that that is Boris, the supervisor, and they work at a casino counting cash from the tables.

So as a result of this post I decided to do some NJ phonebanking today and had what was genuinely the weirdest phone call of my life, and I answered the phone in a congressional office for two years.

Twentysomething libs whose entire lives are based on politics seeing the easiest Instagram story of their lives dropped on their doorstep:

Yeah a lot of confusing "angry screed" with "fluent writer." And even if he was the world's best writer, he was still a naked bigot who no one should be taught to idolize for any reason.

Scalia is a terrible writer, I will die on this hill.

Vanishing American dreams

Accelerating inflation

Clobbered by tarriffs

Just a fun selection of Bloomberg newsletter headlines from this week.

Dem administrations' failure to staff up from the plaintiff's bar is baffling, they know where the bodies are buried! And also they have hate in their hearts!

I regret to tell you that most faxes just go to an email now, rather than being physically printed, and at one point when I worked on the hill we just mass deleted that inbox because it was all out of district people. If you want to fuck you and don't want a phone call, physical mail is the way.

And actually extremely useful thing for JPKIII, genuinely excellent ally to the trans community, to do would be to endorse Beth.

Also, let us never forget that they made their name opposing Title IX sexual assault procedures. A lot of their work follows the prevailing wind of whatever the contrarian position of the day is.

Yes, this person does exist, but they’re a plaintiff-side consumer protection lawyer in their 30s (obsessed with niche details, out of blood) who isn’t on any lists because they didn’t play the clerkship game and they’re practicing rather than in the party.

It also has nothing to say about aggressively enforcing all of this against those who are tearing the country apart. A law without enforcement is just another word for norm, and that's how we got here in the first place. People have got to go to jail.

There's no point in weathering the politics if you don't get an actual durable majority that is fine throwing illegitimate precedents out with the same fervor the current majority had towards legitimate ones.

There also also other aspects, such as jurisdiction stripping, that have to be seriously considered. Also, I would not stop at six seats. Kagan is entirely too squishy to be counted on and Sotomayor is older. If you're doing it, go for at least eight.

The issue with this is that it presumes that there is a point to legislative reforms without court reforms. As the current court has shown us, there absolutely is not because they will shred or not apply and law they don't like. Court reform is not optional, it is the precondition to everything.

(perhaps helpful context, he was an academic physicist.)

But it did work, I loved reading them, and was always welcome to participate in adults discussions as an equal if I'd done the homework. 100% going to do the same (child appropriate version) for our nephew.

When my grandfather died and I was cancelling his subscriptions I realized that he had been paying for my family's New Yorker, Economist, Foreign Affairs, and National Geographic. I think so he could basically run seminars on them and have something to talk about with us?

And they were doing a structural gut renovation and had gotten literally not a single permit. Baltimore!

Oh also, I forgot, I got the cellphone number of our councilmember from a friend to ensure that the housing inspectors would get sent out the same day I called in the complaint and catch them in the act.

The first time I told this story to my coworker he told me that I had gone dead behind the eyes while telling it and he now understood why I was a lawyer. I bring a real "I will ruin your whole entire life" energy to fights.

Two of my favorite books this year I discovered via bsky and have recommended to several others! ( @timclare.bsky.social 's book on games and @mauricejcasey.com 's on Hotel Lux.)

As well as making our law increasingly impossible to comprehend or live up to for the people who are actually affected by it day.