Happy Statehood Day!

Today is Statehood Day here in Slovenia, which was totally apparent from the...occasional closed cafe. Really, I didn't see a darn thing to indicate that this was their equivalent of the Fourth of July. Several times during the day I wondered if I was actually supposed to be at work. Then I remembered nobody would notice if I didn't show up for a day. And all was well.

So I spent the day finishing a Fiss article I'm reading for the paper I still have to write, eating and drinking around the town, and adding some small JJD3-recommended changes to my EL&E paper before I throw it to the wolves (read: HenHan and the Olin prize committee).

Speaking of the law paper prizes, a point of clarification: If you would like to submit your paper for the Edgar Cullen Prize for the best paper written by a first-year law student, send it to Professor Fiss. If you would like to submit your paper for the Edward Cullen Prize for the best paper written on the subject of law and sexy teenage vampires, send it to me. Papers should be a maximum of 500 words and need not have been written for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Last night I watched a few TED videos, which of course led me to the John Hodgman TED video, which of course led me to watch tons of John Hodgman videos. I have to point you to this one, which has one line that cracked me (and Jon Stewart) up more than I can remember anything doing in recent memory. So simple. So brilliant.

And it's been a great week for thinking about sexism! First, on the sister subject of racism, we got this jaw-dropper from Dick Nixon, which, as people have been pointing out, came more than a couple of years after Loving.

Then the Times published an article on a study by an overachieving Harvard undergrad exploring bias against female playwrights. One of her big results was that there is significant bias against female playwrights, but all of it comes from female artistic directors and literary managers. To me this is totally unsurprising...I am fully aware of my biases against women, and in general female-female encounters seem more, well, fraught than male-female or male-male encounters. There's just much more judgment there. It's creepy. And as Ayres mentioned in one class this semester, there are plenty of circumstances where you can observe that blacks are biased against blacks or Jews are biased against Jews to the same (or greater) extent as whites or goyim are, respectively.

Finally, there's this whole Mark Sanford scandal. While I have decidedly mixed feelings about William Saletan, I really, really appreciate his point here. The way fallen politicians treat their mistresses is completely disgusting, and Sanford should be commended for acknowledging that this woman is a person worthy of caring and respect. Sure, she did something immoral, too, but that doesn't mean she deserves complete dismissal and disgust. And then after we commend Sanford, we should boo him as "just another politician with a conservative mind and a liberal penis." Thanks, Jon Stewart. You always know just what to say.

UPDATE: Apropos of the Sanford affair, I post this link to a blog post I wrote about four years ago. My views and worries haven't changed (unless you count being slightly more pessimistic about finding a husband in the first place).