Kieran Healy

The suggestion that women in Saudi Arabia might, conceivably, be allowed to drive cars provokes squeals of outrage:

Consultative Council member Mohammad al-Zulfa’s proposal has unleashed a storm in this conservative country where the subject of women drivers remains taboo. Al-Zulfa’s cell phone now constantly rings with furious Saudis accusing him of encouraging women to commit the double sins of discarding their veils and mixing with men. … [Opponents], who believe women should be shielded from strange men, say driving will allow a woman to leave home whenever she pleases and go wherever she wishes. Some say it will present her with opportunities to violate Islamic law, such as exposing her eyes while driving or interacting with strange men, like police officers or mechanics.

“Driving by women leads to evil,” Munir al-Shahrani wrote in a letter to the editor of the Al-Watan daily. “Can you imagine what it will be like if her car broke down? She would have to seek help from men.” …

It is the same argument used to restrict other freedoms. Without written permission from a male guardian, women may not travel, get an education or work. Regardless of permission, they are not allowed to mix with men in public or leave home without wearing black cloaks, called abayas.

From the guy’s point of view, the great thing about a nakedly patriarchal arrangement like this is that, absent a shift in the whole social order, women driving alone really _would_ be in serious danger. Many men who saw them would likely conclude that they were out cruising for sex, and either beat them up or rape them — and, naturally, blame the women themselves for provoking either outcome. People being the way they are, there will also be women on hand to applaud this sort of thing, thereby helping to justify it. For instance, Wajiha al-Huweidar said Saudi women did not want “the intellectuals to shine and their names to glitter at our expense. We will not permit anyone and we have not appointed anyone to speak on our behalf.” Good for you, sister! You tell those degenerate liberal intellectuals and their disgusting ideas about driving. We need some feminists in Saudi to publish a book on this topic called Our Hardbodies, Ourselves.

Josh Marshall’s new venture, “TPM Cafe”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/ is up and running, as you probably know. It’s a cross between a group blog and something like the Daily Kos model of a community website. Best of luck to them, and hopefully once they find their groove they will lay off the “Pull up a chair” stuff.

For those of us in the U.S., today is “Memorial Day”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Day. America has a fine tradition of military service and sacrifice. The best way to respect and honor it is to reflect on what it means to serve and perhaps die for your country, and to think about the value of the cause, the power of the reasons, and the strength of the evidence you would need before asking someone — someone like your brother, or friend, or neighbor — to take on that burden. That so many are willing to serve is a testament to the character of ordinary people in the United States. That these people have, in recent years, shouldered the burden of service for the sake of a badly planned war begun in the name of an ill-defined cause, on the thinnest of pretexts, and with the most flimsy sort of evidence, is an indictment of the country’s political class.

_Update_: I’ve added a little more below the fold. _Update 2_: And a little more.

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Especially the ones with tenure. I mean, why bother? A variety of answers from “Paul Horwitz”:http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2005/05/why_i_write_no_.html, “Eric Muller”:http://www.isthatlegal.org/archive/2005/05/why_i_write.html, “Orin Kerr”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_05_22-2005_05_28.shtml#1116957530, “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2005/05/why_i_write_legal_scholarship.html and “Michael Madison”:http://madisonian.net/archives/2005/05/18/why-write/. I feel the question is missing a few words at the end. It should of course read “Why do Law Professors write 50,000 word articles?”

Regular readers will “know”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/27/fetishizing-the-text/ that my list of “indispensable applications”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/11/indispensible-applications/ includes the “Emacs”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html&e=9707 text editor, the “TeX/LaTeX”:http://latex.yauh.de/index_en.html typesetting system,and a whole “array”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/&e=9707 of “ancillary”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.astro.uva.nl/~dominik/Tools/reftex/&e=9707 “utilities”:http://www.berger-on.net/jurabib/ that make the two play nice together. The goal is to produce “beautiful”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/&e=9707 and “maintainable”:http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html documents. Also it gives Dan further opportunity to defend “Microsoft Office”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/11/indispensible-applications/#comment-53902. I am happy to admit that a love of getting the text to come out just so can lead to long-run irrationalities. The more complex the underlying document gets, the harder it is to convert it to some other format. And we all know “which format”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx&e=9707 we mean.

Well, yesterday morning the long run arrived: I finished the revisions to my book manuscript and it was now ready to send to the publisher for copyediting. Except for one thing. The University of Chicago Press is not interested in parsing complex LaTeX files. They are “quite clear”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/emsguide.html about what they want, and it isn’t unreasonable. I had a horrible vision of spending weeks manually futzing with a book’s worth of formatted text. But thanks largely to the awesome power of “regular expressions”:http://sitescooper.org/tao_regexps.html, or regexps, and the availability of free tools that implement them, the whole thing was pretty painless.
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We’ve been talking a bit about interdisciplinary work at CT recently. My favorite observation about this comes from my colleague Ron Breiger, who said to me in passing once that the trouble with interdisciplinarity is that you need disciplines in order for it to happen. There are no borders without heartlands, so to speak. Anyway, I got an email this afternoon from a friend of mine who is searching for a speaker:

bq. We are trying to think of a keynote speaker who represents the idea of learning and scholarship across institutions. Someone who crosses borders and who combines disciplinary perspectives. It could be a novelist who writes about science; or someone like Stanley Fish or William Buckley Jr, or … Can you think of any compelling polymaths (famous or otherwise) that could represent the notion of cross-domain writing/thinking?

Well, CT smarties? Can you?

A long article in New York magazine about “Lawrence Lessig’s participation in a lawsuit”:http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/features/12061/index.html against “the American Boychoir School”:http://www.americanboychoir.org/movie.html. A teacher at the school molested boys during the 1970s and Lessig, a former head boy at the school, was one of the victims. He’s now arguing the case in front of the New Jersey Supreme Court. The crux of the lawsuit is whether the school can be held responsible for the actions of its abusive employees. (They’ve settled cases in the past.) I remember seeing the American Boychoir tour bus around Princeton quite regularly. The place is is just down the road from campus. The school is arguing that it is in no more responsible for the actions of the abusers it employed than it would be for employee “stopping in a bar after work and slugging someone in the mouth. ‘Is the company responsible?’ [the school’s lawyer] asks. ‘No. Why not? Because they’re not acting within the scope of employment.'” That seems like a weak analogy. In this case the employee was in a position to repeatedly abuse his victims in virtue of his role and the authority it carried. The school’s defence seems to come perilously close to arguing that it can’t be held responsible for _any_ illegal action that a teacher perpetrated on a pupil, because of course illegal actions are not within the scope of the teacher’s employment.

I don’t know about the legal merits, of course, but on the basis of their past experiences, together with the evasions and blame-the-victim insinuations from the school’s President and its chief lawyer, it’s easy to see how the litigants’ could have a desire to raze the institution to the ground.

Via “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/05/are_moral_philo_2.html I see that the very smart “Kieran Setiya”:http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/ now has a blog. Kieran is a moral philosopher at the “University of Pittsburgh”:http://www.pitt.edu/~kis23/. We were in graduate school at Princeton at the same time, where each of us was known as “the other Kieran” to different portions of our semi-overlapping social network. At least, I’ve always assumed _both_ of us were designated as such at various times –maybe I just routinely came in second.

I’ll admit that I rolled my eyes a little at first. Behold the Freakonomist! “Politically incorrect in the best, most essential way,” said the blurb. A “rogue economist,” who goes out of his way in the first few pages to say he is “afraid of calculus” and doesn’t know how to do theory. Amazing! Incidentally, he trained at Harvard and MIT, was at the Harvard Society of Fellows, won the John Bates Clark medal and teaches at the University of Chicago. Now there’s a sociologically interesting kind of maverick. If only my own fear of calculus had propelled me towards the same peripheries. But this is unfair. Steven Levitt does first-class work that’s reliably provocative in the most productive sort of way. The packaging of the book — the silly title, the song-and-dance to make Levitt himself seem a little, well, freakish — seems mostly the result of getting a journalist and a marketing department on board and turning out the goods a little too fast. The product is a bit thin. But the underlying material is terrific.

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So I picked up the original Star Wars trilogy — or, at least, the re-masticated DVD version, “Greedo shoots first”:http://www.dvdanswers.com/sw1.html and all that — mostly out of curiosity. I hadn’t watched the first two in years and I’d never seen _Return of the Jedi_. I watched most of _The Empire Strikes Back_, which was pretty good, and ended up fast-forwarding through most of ROTJ. My God. Whole chunks of it were simply unwatchable. Just appalling. It’s notable that the first three films share almost all of the faults of the second three, right down to dubiously ethnic alien sidekicks. (Who the hell came up with Lando’s co-pilot, for instance?) This lends credence to the generational-imprint theory of their popularity. These negatives are offset by the freshness of _Star Wars_, the decent dramatic pacing of _Empire_, and the humor of both. But it’s hard not to think that what’s holding the whole edifice together are a couple of good characters (Vader, Yoda, maybe Solo) and some of the design elements: the fighters and ships, the lightsabers, the droids and a few other things. It certainly ain’t the leads, the dialogue, the direction, or the plots.

_Update_: On the other hand, were it not for Lucas we wouldn’t have things “like this”:http://www.withlouis.com/film/yoda/.

_Update 2_: OK, that last clip goes on a bit too long and there’s no real punchline. Try “this one”:http://www.amwmedia.com/downloads/lightsaber.mpg instead. Teh funny.

So when Newsweek publishes a story about the Koran being flushed away, it’s held responsible for riots in Afghanistan and Rumsfeld tells the press to watch what they say. When someone — presumably a soldier or other coalition official — leaks photos of Saddam in his underpants to the Sun, the President is confident that the photos will do “nothing to provoke any backlash”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/middleeast/20cnd-prexy.html?hp&ex=1116648000&en=f0b883a705779f5a&ei=5094&partner=homepage from insurgents. Now that’s a flexible theory of media influence.

11-year-old Katie Brownell, the only girl on her Little League team in upstate New York, “pitched a perfect game”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/nyregion/19perfect.html last Saturday, annihilating the opposing team “in an 11-0 shutout before a stunned crowd of about 100 parents and friends in the bleachers of the Oakfield Town Park.” Now, I am indifferent to baseball, but it has the virtue of being one of those sports that allow for the possibility of a well-defined “perfect game” of some sort. There are fewer of these sports than you might think — they’re generally confined to games where the player has to do something similar over and over again and never make a mistake. Watching a performance like that is quite a different experience from seeing a well-played football game or watching a track race where the winner does everything right. The tension builds in a different way. In the best cases, it takes some time for the crowd even to realize that something special might be on the cards. And of course in this case there’s the whole “who’s laughing now” angle, which I imagine some screenwriter somewhere is already bashing out a treatment of:

bq. Ms. Bischoff said her daughter had been an avid baseball player since she was about 6, and learned the game from two older brothers. But she said Katie’s first year as the only girl in the Little League was trying, and her teammates sometimes told her she should play softball with the other girls.

Eric Muller “reports”:http://www.isthatlegal.org/archive/2005/05/nine_months_lat.html that Peter Irons and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga have “extracted a retraction and apology”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002489.htm from Michelle Malkin, after she smeared them in her book and on her blog last year. At least in some of its parts, the self-correcting blogosphere still needs the threat of legal action to kick it into gear.

“Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/ is an elegantly-designed new blog run by six anthropologists. Its roster includes Alex Golub, whose site I used to read more often in the days before blogs, and who once “wrote a post”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=28 containing the following story:

bq. Met with my advisor the other day to go over a conference paper I gave him that would eventually be turned into a chapter. He said that it was ‘better than ok’, which is the most positive comment I’ve ever gotten from him. Much better than when I was writing my MA, when he’d give me back drafts with comments like “don’t ever give anything of this quality to me again ever”.

I sometimes relate this anecdote to graduate students in order to preempt any passive-aggressive whining about my comments on their work being insufficiently kind and appreciative.