Both Phoebe and Amber discuss women who read textual smut on the subway. I wonder if there is any overlap between the people who read holy books on their morning commutes (who have been numerous my summers in D.C.), the people who read the New York Times, and the people who read Thugs and The Women Who Love Them. I would guess that the holy books and Thugs have the highest overlap, but I am no longer willing to make predictions on this score.

Then again, who am I to make fun? I commended my beloved Ada to somebody this summer and she read it on her morning commute. And Ada is pretty darn racy. See, e.g., this chapter (NSFW). Maybe it would be better if we stopped reading over one another's shoulders.

My true Love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exhange one for the other given:
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;
There never was a better bargain driven.

His heart in me keeps me and him in one,
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was his own;
I cherish his because in me it bides.

His heart his wound received from my sight,
My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;
For as from me, on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart.

Both, equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss:
My true Love hath my heart, and I have his.

-Philip Sidney

Tyler Cowen proposes two different philosophies of searching for somebody to marry:

I define a modal wife (or husband) as a person you would have married (could have married?) had you met them at the right time, unattached, and under normal life conditions. ...

Under one view, you have hundreds or thousands of modal wives, most of whom you never meet. (How many does the average person meet, how soon do you know when you meet one, and how confused would you be if they were all in the same room at once?) Your correct dating strategy is to cast your net very widely, and hope to find and marry one of these people.

Under another view, modal wives are no big deal. Your so-called "modal wives" are no better for you than, say, the best woman you could pick out of a lot of thirty eligibles. The key inputs for a good marriage are attitude and a minimum degree of compatibility, not search and discovery.

Yale Law Professor Robert Gordon makes a case against Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court. I have little to say on the substance at the moment, but one query-- when describing Frankfurter and Harlan (II)'s jurisprudence, Gordon suggests that they:

defer(red) to legislatures ... and construe(d) statutes narrowly to avoid Constitutional questions

My cousin, Michael, died late Saturday night. He was 54. I don't know enough about political science to attempt to memorialize him within that context. He was very successful in his field: a former chairman of his department at Northwestern, a president of the comparative politics field of APSA, and most recently the Charlotte Marion Saden Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Again, I can't speak to these accolades. He was Liz's husband, and Jonah and Hannah's father. He was unswervingly funny. He was terribly bright. He was frustratingly kind. He tolerated our family's loud and raucous political arguments at Thanksgiving tables, despite what must have been some sort of bemused disbelief at our ignorance. Not that he would often correct us, except perhaps with a quiet question curled out from behind his walrused mustache.

I think that what most impressed me when I was younger was that curious smile. Michael was a scientist more than a theorist, and his observer's eye was one of his greatest gifts. He was fascinated by the apparatus of knowing, as enthusiastic about a new health economics data set as he was about any of our younger generation's current captivations. Any words now seem a sort of heartless reduction, since what he brought was the quiet counterpoint of his presence. Was it that easy to miss? Such past stupid blindness mine if it had been.

And then he and Liz were almost unbearably absent this past November. The day after the last Thanksgiving we were all together, the previous year when they were so new and newly bittersweet in New Haven, we sat that Friday around the kitchen table poring through the paper or over timetables back to New York. And Michael sat with his head slightly bent over a cup of coffee, steadily firing out questions and encouragement, and Liz hovered just over his shoulder. We made small talk around the leftovers. What would we do? That day, and in a year, and what did we want to do? There were insufficient answers, although Michael seemed to love them all. And suddenly it was late, and it was a little too cold in the house, and we were rushed to get back to the city, and we left too soon.

Requiescat in pace, Michael. We are left too soon.