Holistic Harvard sounds nice, provided holistic means something good and Harvard isn’t just a legacy institution free-riding on its history of producing our future leaders. But what to make of its decision to make standardized testing optional?

“Test optional” was a fine policy for the topsy-turvy world of the pandemic, when there were lots of idiosyncratic reasons a student might not submit a score, from canceled tests to an immunocompromised parent or sibling. But as things return to normal, it’s unlikely that many kids with top scores will resist the Hobbesian competitive pressures to submit them. There will of course be exceptions — free spirits with ideological qualms about the tests and first-generation applicants who didn’t know to take them. But for many applicants, omitting test scores will be a strategic decision, presumably to play downscores significantly lower than the school’s average.

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An SJ tradition. Merry Christmas and thank you all for the gift of your time and attention.

When the kids are little, we know them. We wipe them, top and bottom, and hold them when they hurt. But they grow up and grow away. We know it. We try to know them as they know themselves, but it’s not really possible to stop seeing them through our parent eyes, hard as we try. Still we try, and too often, fall short. Perhaps the most concrete measure of our inability to see them as they see themselves are the gifts we get them.

These gifts lay embarrassingly bare the dissonance between the giver’s outdated or delusional perception of you and the regrettable reality of you. They make you feel resentful, and ashamed of feeling resentful. You’re afflicted with a terrible pity for these unwanted objects and end up either keeping them in a closet or drawer for decades, or else guiltily returning or regifting them, like leaving a newborn on a doorstep. Continue reading →

Jesse Custer was never one to celebrate Christmas. This year, however, Tulip made a convincing case The Grassy Knoll Pub should be decorated in a festive manner to attract “holiday traffic.”

So one December morning, Christmas lights replaced the yarn on the conspiracy theory boards. At one end of the bar sat a plastic replica of Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree. A Santa hat adorned the alien head on one wall. Continue reading →

We were “clicking” through Netflix and happened on a “comedy” special by some guy named “Bo.” My son stopped and said, “let’s watch this.” Done mostly in song, it started funny, if dark, and then spiraled from there into misery, mental illness and hopelessness.

We talked afterward. What, I asked, was this obsessive embrace of misery? We batted around some theories, from macro misery to micro, but ultimately decided that while most young people don’t want to be miserable, it’s the only guaranteed way not to offend, be vulnerable to destruction and receive some validation that they aren’t worthless failures in a world where everything is “literally” horrible. How can one be happy and hopeful in this kind of world? Continue reading →

The sentence, pretty notorious now, was long enough to shock a lot of people out of complacency. 110 years. Not life. Not four lifetimes. 110 years. That was the sentence imposed upon Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, a truck driver who drove far too fast until he came upon traffic stopped in front of him, whereupon his brakes failed. He could have driven off the highway but made the wrong call. It ended in a fiery crash and four entirely innocent people dead.

For this, the defendant was sentenced to 110 years, with even the judge stating that it was not the sentence he would want to impose. But given the charges, given that he went to trial and was convicted, given the mandatory nature of the sentencing law, both in terms of years and that the sentences be consecutive rather than concurrent, there was no other option, Continue reading →

The back story is so goofy as to be the stuff of legend, but that doesn’t mean things can’t get worse. A civ pro prawf at University of Illinois Chicago John Marshall Law School, Jason Kilborn posed this question on his exam.

After she was fired from her job, Plaintiff sued Employer under federal civil rights law, claiming employment discrimination on the basis of her race and gender. [discussion of other evidence omitted]  Employer also revealed that one of Plaintiff’s former managers might have damaging information about the case, but no one at Employer knew where that former manager was, since she had abruptly quit her job at Employer several months ago and had not been heard from since. Continue reading →

The case against Jeffrey Epstein proxy Ghislaine Maxwell is now in the hands of the jury, with the two sides having summed up their positions.

“It is crystal clear that Maxwell knew about and was deeply involved in Epstein’s sexual abuse of children,” Alison Moe, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury in a closing argument that sought to tie together the government’s evidence, which was presented over 10 days. “Maxwell was key to the whole operation,” she said.

Ms. Maxwell’s lawyer, Laura Menninger, acknowledged in her summation on Monday that the government had “certainly proved” that Mr. Epstein was a “master manipulator” who abused his wealth and privilege. But, she said, “we are not here to defend Jeffrey Epstein.” Continue reading →

Not that he hasn’t been acting all along, but when he died on a Peloton bike in the latest remake of Sex in the City, actor Chris Noth, “Big” on the show, went viral. That lasted for days, about a week, and then it happened.

Triggered by the recent ‘Sex and the City’ reboot, the women allege two incidents of misconduct they say took place more than a decade apart.

The two accusers alleged that they were raped by Noth, one in 2004 and the other in 2015. They appear, as has become the fashionable framing, to be credible accusations. In response, Noth “categorically denied” any misconduct. Continue reading →

The bill was called “Build Back Better” because giving bills cool names has proven more effective in getting public support than actually “selling” the public on what the bill does. Remember the USA PATRIOT Act?* And who doesn’t want to build back better, because building back worse, or not building back at all, sounds horrible. But as becomes clear in the years after a law is enacted, what exactly was done may neither be what the name suggested nor what works.

The efficacy of omnibus bills, proposed laws that cover and broad swathe of unrelated or quasi-related programs, spending and prohibitions, is obvious. The less we know about what’s in there, the fewer things we find to criticize. And it plays the parts we like against the parts we don’t, the parts that seem like a good idea against how that seemingly good idea will actually happen. As hard as it may be to come up with an agreeable law addressing a specific problem, with the right focus, words, execution and funding, it’s far harder to do so when there are a hundred laws folded into one omnibus law. Continue reading →