Perhaps this is a version of Will's Posner citation, an argument which will not be heard or met because the common premises are not so much addressed as argued past. However, Paul Berman's article in The New Republic, a survey of recent books by a vanguard of the New Philosophers which review French Anti-Americanism, is really fantastic. I won't attempt to summarize Berman's review, which, to be fair, is more appreciative than analytic, but I think that it serves to illustrate that there is a counter-counter culture within French society, and also illuminates the intellectual currents of anti-Americanism in France, stretching back to Vichyism and the Third Republic (much is made of anti-Americanism in France prior to this, but I am more skeptical of any account that locates it as a dominant strain of thought among de Tocqueville's contemporaries or uses the reception of Franklin and Jefferson in Paris as its examples). At any rate, a thoroughly worthwhile and fascinating read. (And un-firewalled, for now.)

Dan Solove over at Concurring Opinions weighs the pros and cons of putting up advertisements on the site and turning it into a commercially viable operation. So this seems like a fine time to mention why Crescat doesn't have advertisements.

1: Aesthetics. Where would they go? Would they be ugly? Co-blogger Amy, who polices the look of the blog, would probably pull her hair out if I made her make room for flashing pictures of lord-knows-what politician.

2: Copyright. My understanding is that this site's fair use of various copyrighted materials is much more likely to be recognized if we aren't a money-making operation.

3: Partnership. As the commenter to Solove's post points out, we would have to delve into the rules of informal and formal partnerships if we to start making and dividing lucre. I have no real interest in taking that trouble.

Now of course it is possible that these problems will solve themselves, or that at some point the potential amount of money to be made will be so large that it is worth dealing with them. But so long as it isn't, I won't.

The main dividends from this blog are getting emails, links, and readers.

The New York Times notes what is half of the topic for my paper in progress for Heather Gerken's class. Despite having lost in the Supreme Court and not achieved a remand, Susette Kelo and the other New London homeowners are still there.

My own off-the-cuff guess is that the NLDC will keep its head down for another year or two, until the Connecticut legislature is finally distracted enough to move on to other things, at which point the NLDC will finally take the properties.

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde - Neil McKenna
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

I've always felt that Oscar Wilde was more interesting as a character than as a writer, and Neil McKenna's biography tended to reinforce this opinion (though, read purely as a story, it dragged in the middle as Wilde worked his way through a series of mostly interchangable lovers). McKenna tackles the question of the relationship between Wilde's work and Wilde's life head on, and makes the a convincing case that the former is genuinely better understood in light of the latter, given the myriad coded references to homosexuality that dot the texts. However, given the mores of the period, much of the evidence of who was sleeping with whom amongst London's turn-of-the-century aesthetes rests on allusions, coded references, and unreliable testimony, and I wish McKenna had been better about presenting the evidence he used to reconstruct Wilde's affairs so the reader could judge for themselves how much of the biography rested on likely speculations, and how much on more solid facts.

Never Let Me Go is the best thing Ishiguro has written at least since The Unconsoled, and possibly since Remains of the Day. As a novel, it's both beautiful and creepy, and a wonderful exploration of how hard humans work to make sense of even the most extrordinary circumstances.