Law and Literature

Reading list:

The Bible, Book of Exodus and later selected excerpts.

Herman Melville, selected stories, including "Bartleby"

Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony."

Snow – Orhan Pamuk

Neuromancer – William Gibson

Leo Tolstoy – Great Short Works, including Hadji Murad and Ivan Ilyich

Eugene Zamiatyin – We

Jose Saramago – Blindness

Jack Henry Abbott – In the Belly of the Beast

Fernando Verissimo – Borges and the Eternal Orangutans

J.M. Coetzee – The Life and Times of Michael K

Law Lit, by Thane Rosenbaum, selections

Mario Vargas Llosa – Who Killed Palomino Molero?

Francisco Goldman – The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?

Films: Battle Royale, others, including I hope some new releases.

His-fault divorce

This piece, from Tim Harford on Slate, got me all riled up in an inarticulate, upset way----usually a sign that there's something wrong in my thinking, but I'm not clear where or how. I'm pretty sure that higher rates of divorce are, on balance an over the entire population, bad for women. How to rebut Harford other than bearing anecdote or testimony?

Unintended Consequences

This, from Dubner-Levitt in the NYT, on the unintended consequences of the ADA, Jewish law, and the Endangered Species Act. Via, and with excellent commentary, the always-interesting Marginal Revolution.

She so WRONG ON THE ISSUES

Argh, she makes me crazy. Stephanie Coontz on the future of marriage, here.

Amy Ophelia Winehouse

Reading "Reviving Ophelia" for book club; many observations I agree with, much of the analysis I reject. One of Pipher's methods is a sort of therapy-by-critical-thinking, teaching girls to critically deconstruct their culture with the idea that they will then recognize and reject the destructive elements. For all my disagreements with Pipher, this was one aspect of the book I accepted, more or less.

But consider Amy Winehouse, as an NYT article did this morning. She's often paired with Britney as a pair of lissome pop Ophelias, with their self-destructive attention-seeking. But Amy Winehouse is the anti-Britney, in many ways: her songs have always been, precisely, critical deconstructions of a female-destructive culture. And it doesn't seem to have protected her from its depredations in any way.

Jargon is good

because it conveys useful ideas for reducing complicated observations. Two good ones I learned today: specialization marriage (old version, gender roles) and hedonic marriage (present-day, custom-made for maximum self-realization). From this.

And here's the link to the original piece, "The New Economics of Marriage."