I don't know if the usage is still current, but a lawyer I used to work for referred to "dumb doctor cases." Doctors (along with very successful athletes and entertainers) are able to make a lot of money without knowing much about money, as opposed to successful businesspeople, whose ability to make money very much depends on their knowing about money. So they have money they want to "do something" with and get caught up in dubious investments, tax shelters, and outright frauds -- making much work for lawyers. You'd think that, being doctors, they might have some expert insight into, oh, I don't know, maybe health-care, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals, and invest accordingly, but no, they would dump their money into things they knew nothing about, with sad results.) Maybe now tech millionaires are taking over the dumb doctor ecological niche.

I miss the big, green, curtained machines with toggles and big, noisy levers that NYers used to vote on. They worked -- at least until some of them got very old and nobody was making replacements -- couldn't be hacked, and were easy to understand. If I had the money, I'd buy the rights to them, sell the idea of reviving them, and manufacture them again.

I don't know what to make of this. The OP identifies some objectionable adoption-related practices from the Right and then refers generically to objectionable adoption-related practices from the Left, but doesn't tell us what they are. Maybe BSDI, maybe not. We should at least know what "It" is.

Given Mr. Wonder's age and accomplishments, shouldn't we be calling him "Steve" instead of the diminutive "Stevie"?

When Buruma was appointed to succeed -- you couldn't replace -- Robert Silvers, he was widely thought of as a good choice. The NYRB has published its share of controversial pieces, as well as pieces by awful persons, and took the heat without pushing people out. I can't help thinking that there was more to this than publishing one ill-advised piece.

Most Univ of Kentucky engineering graduates haven’t actually done much with their hands.

The jokes write themselves.

I had no idea Black Bear Diner was a chain. I thought it was just a local diner you recognized.

There are a couple of "presidential historians" who get talking head gigs. Where are the "congressional historians"?

Somebody lost A wedding ring. I'll take it to the lost and found. I hope THE OWNER comes back for it.

The spectrum of possibilites:

1. You can refuse to sell standard cakes or cannolis to people against whom you have a religious objection. Allowing this would gut anti-discrimination law, though for some folk this is not a bug, but a feature.

2. You can refuse to sell a custom cake with a specific message to which you object ("Happy Hitler's Birthday"). Maybe you can be required to make the cake, but leave it to the Nazi to put the Hitler message on it himself. I think a lot of people could support this.

3. You can refuse to sell a custom wedding cake, exactly like the one you'd sell to a couple of whom you approve, to any couple as to whom you have an objection -- same-sex, racially-mixed, divorced nominal Catholics, or what-have-you. I don't see how banning this is a religious freedom or free expression problem

4. You can refuse to sell a custom cake (though not your standard cakes or cannolis) to anyone you damn please, just as you can refuse your ghost-writing services to anyone you damn please.

Good hell…we do not vote on demographics in America.

A point I haven't seen made enough.

This is the problem. What do we do? We can't beat Trump or Trumpism by lying. They're better and more shameless at it, their supporters don't care, and they won't be swayed by whatever lies we come up with. Having actual policies designed to help the WWC (not to mention the WC period), as opposed to Trumpist or standard-issue Republican policies that make their lives worse, doesn't seem to do it. If the WWC resents the urban elites, that's just the way it has always been; the "smart kids" who eventually moved on in life were rarely popular in middle school. And it never mattered what the "smart kids" said or thought about the eventual members of the WWC, who almost always started it.

A great many jobs that would make other folks' lives more pleasant just don't "pay." How much would anyone who had to care about the economics of it pay for school-day crossing guards or cafeteria staff (known in my day as "lunch ladies") or someone to come by every day and check on whether known old people are OK and maybe pick up groceries for them. Although these are all functions that would make life nicer for us, you can't pay such people a decent wage on an economic basis, so we do without. Subsidizing such jobs would give people who lack the skills or inclination to do the rapidly disappearing work that pays for itself, with some left over, dignified functions in life and make things better for the rest of us.

Now you can't go spoiling everyone's fun with facts and common sense. It just isn't fair. And FWIW, my own experiences with DMV have been pretty OK. Far better, for example, than with any number of privately-owned utilities I have to mess with.

This is a very sensible and thoughtful essay on a subject that too often leads to our ancestors being savaged because they lived a long time ago and did what we probably would have done had we lived then. I'm betting you're the only fashion designer with a Hopkins SAIS Masters. There's probably a joke to be found there, but I can't think of it now.

One of my crackpot theories is that, given enough time, everyone with glasses will eventually try on everyone else's glasses. A law school classmate set her glasses down beside me at an outdoor concert and I tried them on. She was nearly as nearsighted as I was. I knew she didn't wear contacts, but most of the time she didn't wear glasses, either. I could never comprehend how she could wander around so seriously nearsighted most of the time when she didn't have to.

My father gave up playing catch with me when I was quite young because I couldn't catch the damn ball. Some years later, we were having a Coke at a local store and he noticed me squinting. He turned his head and saw a sign. "What does that sign say?" he asked. "What sign?" I replied. "That sign over there." "There's a sign over there?"
The next day, I went to the optometrist, who said I was basically blind as a bat (currently about 20/400). We used to get eye tests in school, so how come nobody noticed before? Because of the alphabet, I was always seated near enough to the blackboard to make out the teachers' large writing. What about the eye tests? Before the first one, I had to visit the school nurse on another matter. I sat beneath the eye chart, bored out of my mind. I spent the next several minutes looking at it and making up nonsense words from the chart. When I came in later that year, the nurse asked me to tell her what was on the chart. Nobody mentioned that it was a vision test and I assumed she wanted to know what was on the chart for some damn-fool reason and couldn't be bothered to check for herself. Although I couldn't see it worth a damn, I knew the nonsense words I had created and, being a polite and helpful kid, informed the nurse what the chart said. So no one ever knew I couldn't see.
Every so often, my father would get maudlin about the whole business, probably believing that he had blighted my young life by giving up on playing catch when I couldn't see.
I still can't catch.

He2 -- If greatly increased life spans did not come with longer periods of the diseases and infirmities of old age, our vibrant, healthy selves would have a few extra decades of doing vibrant, healthy things. Then, at some point, the odds that we would fall off a ladder, suffer permanent brain damage after a 30-year run as an NFL quarterback, or otherwise f**k ourselves up royally and for the rest of a depressingly long life would be close to a sure thing.

Now bookdragon, you can't call bullshit on someone's feelings. Facts have nothing to do with it.

I don't know about usage in the UK, but in the US of A men call men "dicks" or "pricks" all the time, but also, far less frequently, "cunts." They are all insults, but they carry different shades of meaning. You can probably work out the differences.

Does marriage cause stability, or does stability cause marriage, or are there vicious and virtuous circles depending on the decisions you make?

As a fairly senior government lawyer in NYC who has been poking about in private sector opportunities, I can't get excited about the salary history question ban. My pitiful government salary is a matter of public record, but even if employers don't look it up, the general salary scale is widely known and a savvy potential employer will likely have a very good idea what I make without asking.

Many years ago, when I took Commercial Transactions in law school, the professor explained that banks almost never check the signatures on checks below certain amounts. That day, I went to the law school bookstore, bought something, and paid with a check signed "E. Allan Farnsworth," the professor's name. The bookstore took the check, the bank cleared it, and I presented a copy of the cancelled check to the professor, who got a kick out of it.

What would be the objection to fingerprinting and DNA sampling everyone at birth and creating a database ? Would I like it? No. Would it violate my rights? Nots o sure.

To be picky and legalistic, the feds don't have the power to impose a common core curriculum directly, but it could bribe the states by conditioning federal aid on its adoption.