From Southern Spaces, Mark Auslander (Brandeis): The Other Side of Paradise: Glimpsing Slavery in the University's Utopian Landscapes; and Jennifer Ritterhouse (GMU): Dixie Destinations: Rereading Jonathan Daniels' A Southerner Discovers the South. Anis Shivani on why America suffers from one catastrophe after another and why it will keep happening. Geoffrey O'Brien reviews Selected Prose by Heinrich von Kleist. From Writ, Michael Dorf on the Supreme Court's decision about sexually dangerous federal prisoners: Could it hold the key to the constitutionality of the individual mandate to buy health insurance? The reason you can't give regulators (of Wall Street or Big Oil) too much "discretion" is that they'll always be outsmarted by the private sector — that's why standards have to be spelled out in the law. A review of Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan. More than any other word, perhaps, helpless is the one best for describing exactly how what's happening in the Gulf renders people. In the thrall of the Billionaire Boys Club: It has the potential to become Barack Obama’s Vietnam; not the Gulf oil spill, serious though that is, but the system of public education. Aliens Like Us: Anthropologist Scott Littleton believes the truth is out there, somewhere. Etiquette for schmucks, schlemiels, schlimazels and schmendriks: What, in the way the word is used, makes a schmuck a schmuck? From The L Magazine, Jonny Diamond on what we talk about when we talk about hipsters. Just how fashionably detached do you need to be? It’s a rule that the more aloof one is toward popular culture, the more noble and/or interesting one’s life pursuits must be. Sara Libby on the media’s ongoing war on single black women. Afghan War is now the longest war in U.S. history.
