For my Buy Me a Coffee supporters I wrote a report from Mission Control.
How much would you pay for a smarter baby? — I can imagine the lawsuits later: “We paid for a smarter baby but instead we got a child who’s compassionate and generous! We’ve been screwed!”
Via Ian Leslie, a beautifully designed page on ordinary abundance.
Book/magazine cover art by Kenneth Romney Towndrow
A remarkable intaglio from the Getty Museum: Aeneas and his family escaping Troy. The museum dates this around 20 B.C., which was around the time of Virgil’s death, with his poem unfinished — and surely this is a depiction of the scene specifically as described by Virgil, with Aeneas carrying Anchises on his back and leading Ascanius by the hand. Does this mean that the artist had read the in-progress Aeneid? Or that Virgil was borrowing the details from some earlier history?
The third installment of my Dispatch series on the meaning of the Second World War today.
Back in Tokyo, after the fireworks spectacular, I went to Yoyogi Park. An announcement was playing: “Rollerblading is dangerous, make sure you don’t do it! And be sure to not play catch! And stay off the bike paths! And don’t run in the non-running areas!” I was barely ten feet into the park when I heard those broadcast rules in both Japanese and English. As the rules were sermonized overhead, people moved with heat-stroke torpidity, smartphones cradled near their faces. Last fall, while walking through Yoyogi, I counted: 97 out of 100 people were looking at their phones. Nobody was doing anything that looked particularly fun. Never have I felt it more acutely: The world doesn’t need a park that bans rollerblading. It needs one that bans smartphones.
As Nachman said, [Sullivan] lost because they changed the law. And, I think it’s fair to say that they changed the law because the Court — and in particular Justice Brennan — favored the role of the institutional press in American society and wanted to create a more favorable environment for that industry. I have speculated elsewhere (in my The Judiciary’s Class War) that the justices, being drawn from the same educated gentry class as the editors of leading newspapers and magazines, deliberately took their side. One can see this in subsequent decisions that expanded the “public official” exception to the far broader and more amorphous “public figure” exception. The effect of this expansion was essentially a subsidy for news media, allowing them to publish more sensationally and with less fact-checking, at the expense of their audiences who were less well informed, and of the people they covered, who were left without a realistic remedy for defamation.
This is exactly right, both about the badness of Sullivan and about the reasons for the badness. It is one of the classic cases of SCOTUS not interpreting but making law.