Covid-19 has done many bad things, not least of which is laying bare the precarious foundation on which many of our lives dance. But one good thing: pausing the rat race. I was recently reading an old scuffle between Will Wilkinson and Henry Farrell over the nature of status. Wilkinson…

A teaching assistant of mine recently told a class of harried first-year law students that, “if we squinted,” we would see the deeper layers of a case we were examining. The comment tightly captured what I sense is my generation’s dominant enterprise: learning to squint, and not just when staring…

I’ve completed my first semester of law school. As such, reflections are in order. Arguably, what’s been more thrilling than the subject matter are the ways in which students respond. These responses fall into a few categories: “This is really just a political question” Students these days, it seems, ache…

Congressional hearings are a bizarre spectacle. For one, members arrive with a set of remarks whose purpose is to rebut, well, the purpose of the hearing — which is to educate hurried pols about complex issues, in the hope that such an education will chasten their loyalties to party-line positions. …

My recent political education has got me thinking whether ideological fidelities are ultimately a rather semantic commitment. It seems to me the premise behind most rank punditry is that ideological battles are important because fidelity to one tribe implicitly concedes that the other tribe inhabits some odious no man’s land. …