Report from a Social Distance Week 7: For lockdown horror, 'Dr. Rick' prescribes hibachi, водка, and tulips

My new doorbell cam
spies a ne'er-do-well.

Quote of the Week:  "Murder hornets, but with the right lawyer, manslaughter bees. 🐝"  —attorney Jennifer T. Langley

Our stay-at-home order is formally lifted in Rhode Island as of today, May 9, though in this phase one, most restrictions remain in place as either mandates or recommendations.  I’m not eager to go out much myself until we have effective antibody testing, and then we'll see.  And we’ll have to hope and pray that our economic reopening doesn’t drive up the infection numbers.  Three days ago, with stay-at-home still in place, I saw dozens of kids playing basketball at Burr's Hill Park.  Parents were there, too.  “Knock it off,” Governor Gina Raimondo would have said.

Oh, I almost forgot the week's most exciting news.  Hitting the grocery store first thing in the morning, we scored a whole package of toilet paper!

Knock it off.  This is week 7.

What I’m Watching

Knives Out (2019).  This movie is a rollicking good time, an Oscar-nominated screenplay in the hands of a classic cast.  Daniel Craig, with a credible Mississippi drawl, proves why he’s so much better than Bond, and Jamie Lee Curtis, well, enough said.

Ozark s3 (2020).  I finally caught up, and there’s a reason why this show was viewers’ number one new binge in lockdown.  The show remains intense, not for the faint of heart.  I didn’t see coming that Helen would play such a pivotal role in season 3.  Now I have to make room on my top TV lawyers list, category: drama, for Janet McTeer’s Helen Pierce (link to spoilers).  This is not Newcastle UK-born McTeer’s first turn as a TV lawyer; she played Patty Hewes’s vengeful secret sister Kate Franklin in the final season (2012) of Damages.  In the Marvel universe, she’s Jessica Jones’s mom, Alisa Jones.

American Horror Story: 1984 (s9) (2019).  For me, AHS has never been able to top season 5’s super-creepy Hotel (2015-16), with Lady Gaga, but season 9 was enjoyable.  It’s AHS’s answer to Stranger Things, and I can’t get enough of these tongue-in-cheek ’80s tributes.  As usual, the anthology series assembles an all-star squad of regular and guest stars.  Carrie Fisher daughter and “Scream Queen” Billie Lourd well anchors the cast.

Locke & Key s1 (2020).  I was pleasantly surprised by the first couple episodes.  The show may fairly be described as YA, employing the convenient contrivance that the adults can’t see the evil spirits.  Nevertheless, it’s creative and cleverly executed.  Our teenage heroes occupy a haunted house, of sorts, in coastal Massachusetts.  Really the series is filmed mostly on finely crafted sets in Toronto with gorgeous outdoor scenes in UNESCO World Heritage Site Lunenberg, a port town on Nova Scotia’s southeastern coast.  I’m fast becoming a fan of lead actor Connor Jessup, who played Ben Mason in Falling Skies (2011).  The Locke & Key story is based on a 2008-13 graphic novel series (Amazon) of the same name and in a style that pays homage to H.P. Lovecraft (a Providence, Rhode Island, native, see also Atlas Obscura) and Richard Matheson (obituary).  A Fox pilot that wasn’t picked up, Locke & Key also was a 2011 TV movie by director Mark Romanek, who directed the recent s1e01 of Tales from the Loop.

Outer Banks s1 (2020).  I'm not going to pretend this is more than it is.  Another YA offering, sometimes I like to immerse myself in the equivalent of what my grandmother called her "stories," pretty people in the throes of impossible melodrama. Bonus, Outer Banks actually has a thrilling story from writer Shannon Burke and the filmmaker Pate Brothers. It's Treasure Island meets 90210, and I thought that before I learned that Burke's most recent and successful novel, Into the Savage Country (2016), was, he said, inspired by books including TI, Kidnapped, and White Fang.  The show totally confirmed my suspicion that my niece and nephews growing up on the OBX lead frenetic lives filled with intrigue, murder, and buried treasure, all interlaced with vertiginous adolescent lust.  The cast, the usual twenty-somethings pretending to be ten years younger, are mostly relative newcomers, well handpicked from the minor character ranks of such other recent features as Stranger Things, Black Lightning, and The Hate U Give.  On the adults-as-adults side, American Horror Story alumna Adina Porter, also a veteran of True Blood and Newsroom, turns in another spellbinding performance as Sheriff Peterkin.

Basic Versus Baller: Travel at Any Cost s1 (2018-19).  The perfect virtual escape from lockdown, I'm torn between loving these guys and burning with envy that I didn't think of this first.  Brothers Marko and Alex Ayling, "the Vagabrothers," went to university in southern California and were teaching English in Spain when they started vlogging in 2012.  They became a YouTube sensation and were invited to make 10 episodes of this show for Tastemade, an eight-year-old, Santa Monica-based, food-and-travel media company that has carved out a lucrative niche on the digital frontier.  The show is available on various platforms; I'm watching on Hulu.  The conceit is that in each episode, one brother gets to live the high life and the other has to hostel it, as they explore destination cities and their food worldwide.  Sponsorships figure in unobtrusively.  The competition angle is light-hearted, as the brothers succeed in sharing the delights of different price points and put local culture on center stage.

Progressive ads.  Progressive Insurance—which has never had a worthwhile deal for me—has a hilarious new ad character, "Dr. Rick."  “Progressive can’t protect you from becoming your parents” is the theme; Dr. Rick's intervention was forecast by two also funny "parentamorphosis" ads seven months ago.  Two new 30-second bits are “Group Outing” and “Pillows.”  There’s also a 74-second mockumentary on YouTube.  Progressive’s faux Zoom lockdown ad, with Flo, is pretty funny, too.  Progressive uses the Boston-based ad agency Arnold, and Martin Granger directed.

What I’m Eating

Miku Japanese Cuisine.  To #Save­Our­Restaurants, we ordered curbside this week from nearby Miku: wonton soup, crispy calamari, pork gyoza, sesame chicken, and a ridiculous portion of hibachi chicken.

What I’m Drinking

Community House Blend.  A new order arrived from Community, and we started with the solid house blend, a medium-dark roast.

Водка Окно в Европу.  We took a short interlude from our gin habit.  The name of this Russian vodka by St. Petersburg-founded Ladoga Group translates to “Window on Europe.”  I brought it back from Russia, mostly for the pretty design on the bottle.  Inside, what can I say, it’s vodka.

Dry Line Cape Cod Gin.  A Christmas gift from my wife, this briefly barrel-aged, organic-cane-sugar double distillation from South Hollow Spirits in North Truro, Massachusetts, leads with juniper berries harvested locally from eastern red cedars, and follows up with angelica root grown in a compost of Truro Vineyard grape skins.  My bottle is from small batch #10.  The Boston Globe aptly said it “has a soft bite,” and Drink Hacker likewise reported a “palate … extremely soft for a gin of this alcohol level,” 47% ABV, with a “sweet and lengthy” finish.

What I’m Doing to Stay Sane

Google Nest Thermostat and Hello.  We gained some distraction through home improvement and a socially distancing visit from our masked local technician.  Google’s thermostat gets a 👍 thumbs up; its doorbell gets a 👎 thumbs down.  The thermostat we bought to replace our broken one.  It’s pricey, but we expect to recoup savings from all those times we both leave home and forget to turn the heat off.

The Hello doorbell/security cam was a gift.  It makes a quality image and shares a futuristic look with the thermostat.  But it comes with a lot of shortcomings.  First, the Hello is almost useless without a paid subscription.  The device itself has no processing ability; it’s dumber than a mere motion sensor.  The Hello must constantly stream image to and from Google just to check for motion.  Hence, the subscription is necessary if you want the device to be anything more than a doorbell.  Second, the data stream eats bandwidth and will ruin you if your service is capped.  Third, the cloud-based detection algorithms have a long way yet to go.  The motion sensor is oversensitive, set off by trees and shadows.  The sound sensor is a non-starter on our busy street.  These shortcomings are all understandable for a work-in-progress product, but not for one that demands a monthly fee.  I have a Blink camera already, and I’m much happier with that.

Watching spring spring.  The tulips are opening, despite a continuing cold that diverges daily more from seasonal highs.  The birds are fighting it out for access to the feeder.  Sometimes #QuarantineLife is just about watching the grass grow.

Happy Mother's Day!

🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷

Photos and video, except in "What I'm Watching," RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0

Report from a Social Distance: Week 3

Tort Anomalies, Other Worlds, and Fox Tales

Ready for shopping

My quarantine since returning to the United States ended last weekend, and we made a bold trip to the grocery store to refuel.  Whole Foods effectively stopped delivery here since the strike, and our nearest locally owned delivering grocer is on the opposite side of Narragansett Bay.  So we suited up with gloves and, as Rhode Island Governor Raimondo instructed, bandana masks to leave the house.  Otherwise, life isn't much different in or out of official self-quarantine.

What I'm Reading

My sabbatical plans prematurely aborted, this week involved catching up on some professional reading.  For those into legal arcana, here are the most interesting reads that crossed my virtual desk.  Other readers, feel welcome to scroll down to TV.  I'm also continuing with my church's Bible reading, which has us into the David saga of 2 Samuel, with excellent accompanying video as usual by the BibleProject.  For those who celebrate, respectively, happy Passover, and happy Easter!

Steve Hedley, Tort: The Long Good-Bye (Apr. 8, 2020).  Posted to SSRN, this paper is a fascinating survey of tort law through history, culminating in and replete with contemporary observations ripe for the unpacking.  Prof. Steve Hedley, University College Cork School of Law and Private Law Theory, sees tort law as on its way out, but not without leaving tort lawyers and scholars with plenty of work to do in the process.  As his abstract explains, "Discouraging harmful behaviour is a fundamentally different project from supporting the sick and penniless.... [W]e cannot finally say farewell to tort until all of its vital functions are replaced with better provision, which requires both political will and a fair degree of optimism – both currently rare commodities."  Consider this observation: "From the 1980s onwards in the US, ‘tort reform’ began to be code for restricting tort without replacing it with any other system – in other words, putting tort’s hitherto steady expansion into reverse."  As someone committed to tort's social value and also someone who suffers anxiety over corporatocracy, I found compelling Hedley's broader thesis that the tort system has been honed over centuries to work its aims on people, and the system is dysfunctional vis-à-vis corporations, which today account for the vast majority of tort defendants.

James Macleod, Ordinary Causation: A Study in Experimental Statutory Interpretation, 94 Ind. L.J. 957 (2019).  Causation has been a central obsession of philosophers for millennia, and it's something lawyers worry a lot about too.  I am liable for battery if I punch a compatriot at the bar.  But that conclusion assumes that the plaintiff-victim is complaining of injury that sits along a causal flow downstream from my ill intention.  What if the plaintiff suffered from a pre-existing injury, and I complicated it?  What if, subsequent to our encounter, the plaintiff's injuries were worsened by medical malpractice?  Things get more complicated when physical injury is removed from the problem.  When is an employer's discriminatory intent a legal cause of wrongful termination if the employee would have been fired anyway for misfeasance?  In tort law, contemporary American courts struggle to approximate the "ordinary" meaning and understanding of causation.  See, e.g., Comcast Corp. v. Nat'l Ass'n of Afr. Am.-Owned Media, No. 18-1171 (U.S. Mar. 23, 2020) (SCOTUSblog).  In an ambitious project of empirical survey research, Prof. James Macleod, Brooklyn Law School, has demonstrated that despite this effort, our understanding in tort law may have diverged from ordinary understanding in important respects.

Daniel J. Solove, The Myth of the Privacy Paradox (last rev. Mar. 13, 2020).  Years ago, when privacy law was barely a thing, those of us working in freedom-of-information-advocacy circles counter-argued to personal-privacy proponents that the public's desire for privacy was belied by how readily a person would surrender name, address, and telephone number for an extremely unlikely "chance to win" ripped from a cereal-box top.  The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press named an influential publication after this "privacy paradox" in 1998, and my friend and colleague Charles N. Davis, now dean of journalism at Georgia, ushered the concept into the digital age.  More recently, see WNYC Note to Self's "Privacy Paradox" project (logo pictured).  Now privacy law guru Prof. Daniel Solove, George Washington Law, has turned his attention to the problem.  In a new paper, posted to SSRN in February and forthcoming in the GW Law Review, 2021, Solove explains that the paradox emerges from an error in level of abstraction.  A person's disregard for privacy in the narrow and specific context of filling out a raffle entry cannot be equated to a person's rational and more holistic notion of personal integrity.

Alien tort: Nevsun Resources Ltd. v. Araya, 2020 S.C.C. 5, [Feb. 28, 2020] (Canada).  Amid recent decades of globalization, comparatists and internationalists in U.S. tort law have been rapt with waxing and waning trends in the extraterritorial application of American law, especially under the enigmatic Alien Tort Statute (e.g., Radiolab).  The same trends are evident around the world, as national courts struggle to demarcate limits to their own power, balancing classical principles of comity and judicial restraint against burgeoning challenges to human rights coming from both public and private sectors.  In a 5-4 decision in February, the Canada Supreme Court dismissed a claim under customary international law upon compelling allegations: "Three Eritrean workers claim that they were indefinitely conscripted through Eritrea’s military service into a forced labour regime where they were required to work at a mine in Eritrea. They claim they were subjected to violent, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The mine is owned by a Canadian company, Nevsun Resources Ltd."  The court dismissed under "act of state doctrine," an extra-constitutional principle of judicial restraint comparable in function (see, e.g., Achebe, Cooper, Hill), to foreign sovereign immunity.  HT @ Prof. Simon Baughen, Swansea University, Wales.

Climate change: Smith v. Fronterra Co-op. Grp. Ltd., [Mar. 6, 2020] N.Z.H.C. 419 (New Zealand).  In a legal era of legislative abdication, interest groups have resorted to courts around the world to combat climate change.  A victory upon an unusual statutory basis in a Dutch appellate court in 2018 (The Savory Tort, Oct. 12, 2018), upheld by the Dutch Supreme Court in 2019, lent perhaps undue optimism to the global movement, which is ongoing.  Courts in many nations have fairly determined that the judiciary is ill suited to tackle the profound policy crisis of climate change.  Accordingly, in January, the U.S. Ninth Circuit dismissed a youth class action in Oregon that had gained some traction after an indulgent district court ruling (The Savory Tort, Oct. 12, 2018).  Juliana v. United States, No. 18-36082 (9th Cir. Jan. 17, 2020).  Unremarkably, then, the New Zealand High Court decided likewise, in part, in a climate case in Auckland in March.  A plaintiff coastal land owner sued greenhouse-gas-emitting energy and dairy interests on three tort theories, "public nuisance, negligence, and breach of an inchoate duty."  The court dismissed the first two counts for reasons of, respectively, failure of injury different in kind and degree as between plaintiff and public, and failure of foreseeability.  What's interesting is what the court wrote briefly about the plaintiff's surviving "inchoate" theory:

I am reluctant to conclude that the recognition of a new tortious duty which makes corporates responsible to the public for their emissions, is untenable. As noted by [three justices on the N.Z. Supreme Court in a paper at a 2019 climate change conference in Singapore] it may be that a novel claim such as that filed by Mr Smith could result in the further evolution of the law of tort. It may, for example, be that the special damage rule in public nuisance could be modified; it may be that climate change science will lead to an increased ability to model the possible effects of emissions. These are issues which can only properly be explored at trial. I am not prepared to strike out the third cause of action and foreclose on the possibility of the law of tort recognising a new duty which might assist [plaintiff] Mr Smith.

HT @ Prof. Barry Allan, University of Otago, Dunedin, N.Z., who predicts, via the Obligations Discussion Group, "that the defendants will appeal the decision that the inchoate tort is tenable, although they may act strategically and demand that this first be properly pleaded."

What I'm Watching

Goliath s3 (Amazon trailer) was so much better than s2.  Season 2 kind of sold out on the concept of Billy McBride as a civil lawyer and got drawn nearly into the realm of trite criminal procedural.  Plenty of crimes definitely happen in s3, but the legal drama centers on a class action lawsuit to save a small California town that's had its water supply stolen by a ruthless family of almond farmers.  Billy McBride (Billy Bob Thornton) and partner Patty Solis-Papagianis (Nina Arianda) are in top form, and legal TV trivium: Patty's biological mother is played by Monica Potter, who was Crane, Pool & Schmidt associate Lori Colson in Boston Legal s1 (2004-05).

Ragnarok s1 (Netflix trailer).  This six-episode Norwegian supernatural mystery is thoroughly entertaining, with top-flight dubbing into English.  It's proved a smashing success as a Netflix original—Netflix has 750,000 subscribers in Norway and 4m in Scandinavia, according to What's On Netflix—produced by Copenhagen-based SAM, and already has been green-lighted for a second season.  The show takes place in the fictional Norwegian town of Edda, which is the real southwestern, fjord-side town of Odda, where a ruthless family of manufacturing magnates have poisoned the local water supply and accelerated the melting of the glaciers (recurrent theme). Our hero, Magne (David Stakston), is a Billy Batson-like teen who gradually realizes that he's a kind of incarnation of the Norse god Thor, destined to battle evil to save his town and the environment. The story plays loosely with Norse myth, giving Magne a trickster brother, Laurits, played with Loki-worthy aplomb by Jonas Strand Gravli.

The New Pope (HBO).  Academy Award-winner John Malkovich proves his iconic status yet again in this brilliant portrayal of a weirdly enigmatic and intellectual Pope John Paul III, who ascends to the papacy upon the unusual circumstance of a comatose predecessor.  This is really a second season, a worthy sequel series to The Young Pope, in which Jude Law starred as a megalomaniacal yet magnetic and possibly truly divine Pope Pius XIII.  Negligible spoiler, mostly tease: Pius does come out of his coma, and the two great actors take the screen together before the season ends.

Altered Carbon s2 (Netflix trailer).  Dystopian science fiction at its small-screen best, this Emmy-nominated winner is back to tell more of the story of "the last Envoy" soldier Takeshi Kovacs, based on the cyberpunk novels of Richard K. Morgan.  Thanks to the plot device of human immortality through changing bodies ("resleeving"), New Orleans-born Anthony Mackie, the Avengers' Falcon, is able to take over, from s1's Joel Kinnaman, House of Cards' Will Conway, the lead role of Kovacs in s2, and muscular Mackie shines, or broods, as the case may be.  Ironically, the delightful yet ephemerally holographic character of Poe is carried over from s1 in the capable craft of Chris Conner.  Netflix also has premiered a 74-minute animated feature film in the Altered Carbon universe, Resleeved; Conner has a voice role.

Curb Your Enthusiasm s10 (HBO).  Comedy break.  Every episode is instant-classic LD. The familiar cast returns, including Jeff Garlin, who never misses an improvised punchline.


A new category this week, "I Watched, But Can't Recommend":

First, a lot of folks are talking about Kingdom, a two-season-and-counting Korean Netflix horror to sate your unhealthy bloodthirst for zombies when you've run out of Walking Dead and Z Nation.  I got through half of s1, and it couldn't hold my interest.  The zombies are secondary to a drama about entitlement to the royal throne; I had trouble following the story or caring.  If you need a zombie fix, I suggest Daybreak s1 on Netflix, though it will not get a second season.

Second, I caught up on Riverdale s4 over at CW TV, coming soon to Netflix.  It was a decent backdrop for multi-tasking, but couldn't hold my attention full-time.  It was fun for the first couple of seasons, but the characters and story have played out.  If you're missing K.J. Apa, watch The Hate U Give again while hoping his agent gets him another worthy TV vehicle.

Third, Westworld s3.  To be fair, I'm probably going to watch the whole thing, because I love the visuals and the addition of Aaron Paul.  But what the heck is going on?  Who are all these people?  Maybe the pieces will come together, but as of now, I'm not even sure what the show is about.

What I'm Eating

As we made it to the grocery store this week, my wife acquired the necessaries for her famous Louisiana gumbo with chicken and andouille.  The filé powder we had already, not easy to come by in New England.

Remember, as your resources permit, to #SaveOurRestaurants.  We had goat cheese burgers from Billy's last week, and this week we have our eye on Brickyard Pizza Co.

What I'm Drinking

We're very fond of Gevalia's single-origin line, and Costa Rica Special Reserve is our favorite.  Tico ag, Swedish craftsmanship.

The Foxtale Dry Gin, from Portugal, is inspired by the fox of The Little Prince (Amazon; in The New Yorker): "the ideal digestive for a night with friends"—at a proper social distance, of course.  A solid choice, though I'm hard pressed to detect any particular botanical beyond the citrus and a hint of malt.

What I'm Doing to Stay Sane

Photo by JJBers CC BY-SA 4.0

East Bay Bike Path.  I haven't been able to run with the sprained ankle I dragged home from Africa, but biking has been OK.  And luckily, as yet, Rhode Island has not closed the bike paths with the state parks.  There was a rumor of bike path closure on Nextdoor.com, and I hope that doesn't come to be.  I admit that there have been some troubling concentrations of people at bike path choke points, as in the center of East Providence.  But if the paths close, there will only be more people squeezed along busy, sidewalk-less streets, such as mine, where cars compound the corona risk.  Hear me, o Honorable Governor.

Our long national nightmare lumbers on.

Civil rights suit claims a right to education.The problem might be bigger.

My UMass Dartmouth colleague in history, Professor Mark Santow, also a member of the Providence, R.I., School Board, is part of litigation filed Wednesday, November 28, against the State of Rhode Island, claiming that the government is violating civil rights by failing to provide adequate education to youth in the public school system.

The complaint in Cook v. Raimondo, in federal district court in Rhode Island, where I reside, is available online from WPRO.  The suit was ably contextualized by Alia Wong for The Atlantic and covered by The New York Times.  Wong's piece, along with its sidebars and links, recounts the troubled history of claims to education rights under the U.S. Constitution and the unique if stubborn position of the United States in the world in refusing to add children's education to our pantheon of civil rights.

Personally I worry about the overuse of human rights language to enshrine the mundane as sacred and thereby downgrade basic human needs to aspirational wish lists—witness the dilapidated state of South African townships while the courts struggle to engineer economic rights into reality.  But I also readily admit that our 1789 Constitution, in part owing to its excessively burdensome Article V amendment process, has fallen behind the times on some omissions that, with the benefit of hindsight, seem to be no-brainers—such as sexual equality, the right to privacy, the freedom of information (a.k.a. right to access to information), and quite well arguably, rights to breathable air and basic education.

The Cook complaint smacks of activist litigation, aimed as much at media and policymakers as at the courts.  It gets around to its legal claims in number 121 of its 133 paragraphs.  Nevertheless, the claims are clever and worth pondering.  In five counts, the complaint neatly alleges violation of (1) the equal protection clause (mostly "fundamental interest," though there's a strong thread of "diversity" too), (2) the due process clause, (3) the privileges-and-immunities clause, and then—here's where things get spicy—(4) the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, and (5) the republican guarantee clause.

The Fourteenth Amendment claims are built upon a compelling background that heralds the Framers' recognition of education's essentiality to democracy, followed by a depressing account of how public education in civic virtue lately gave way to a bottom-line-oriented mill of standardized test preparation, woefully inadequately equipped and devoid of vision or values.  The story is downright Orwellian, as the complaint describes the plodding production of glassy-eyed sheep to populate America, children robbed and broken of the knowledge, skill, or will to challenge the status quo.  One wonders that Ayn Rand herself would not be persuaded to the cause of public education.

Added to the conventional Fourteenth Amendment angle are those thought-provoking latter claims about jury service and republican governance.  Citation to the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, as well as the federal Jury Act, focuses on that vital and rare obligation of citizen direct participation in government to assert a denial of rights both to the jurors who are ill prepared for the job and, consequently, the litigants and criminal defendants who depend on an informed jury to vindicate their rights.  In the final count, the republican guarantee clause is cited with indirect reference to the First Amendment ("free speech and other constitutional rights"), suggesting that an ill informed electorate can neither vote nor participate in government sufficiently to maintain representative democracy.  I can't help but think of the seemingly insoluble dilemma of money in politics, evidenced by the fealty to corporate donors pledged by our paralyzed, gerrymandered, and hardly-any-longer representative Congress.

Cook brings readily to mind the Juliana climate change lawsuit (and the Dutch Urgenda decision), about which I wrote recently.  Juliana seems doomed in the U.S. Supreme Court, if ever it were to get that far, despite a curiously indulgent ruling by Judge Ann L. Aiken in federal district court in Oregon (and later), sending the case on to trial.  It's overwhelmingly probable that the Juliana plaintiffs do not expect to win.  Rather, they seek to make a point, and they're doing so well.  So in Cook, too, as in a similar case on appeal in Michigan, the litigants have opined publicly that they hope to draw the attention of lawmakers and to stimulate public discussion—even to educate student-plaintiffs through the process, something also happening in the Juliana case, in which students appears as plaintiffs, and Judge Aiken relies deliberately on the work of student externs.  Consonantly, these cases stir up amicus feeding frenzies; NGOs in Cook already are jockeying for position to get their say on the public record.  (I'm not above it.)

As something of a separation-of-powers formalist, I'm troubled by the use of the courts for policy-making activism.  The courts are not designed for policy-making, and judges are not hired to be activists.  The late Justice Scalia famously and aptly lamented the prospect of nine black-robed "moral philosophers" in Washington, D.C., with lifetime appointments, making policy decisions for a purportedly democratic nation.  When I see a complaint that is drafted for public consumption and political persuasion rather than for judicial interrogation and a search for truth, I fear the strategy undermines whatever remains of the bar's reputation for professional integrity and objective clarity.

At the same time, this rise in judicial activism is a sign and symptom of something very broken about our democracy.  People are resorting to the courts because the political branches are not responsive.  Much as the Cook plaintiffs suggest, our system of government is failing to represent its constituents.  The complaint asserts, "Most social studies classes in Rhode Island do not discuss social problems and controversial ideas ...."  The complaint concludes: "A positive civic ethos requires all students to feel that they have a stake in the society and in its political system, and that institutions can work for them and their families in the future, even if these institutions have not been fully responsive to their needs in the past."

Whether for the right to breathable air or a basic education, a frustrated youth is turning to the courts not as a first resort, but as a last resort.  If in the end, none of our three branches of government delivers on the American promise—not the dream per se, but the opportunity to attain it—where will complainants go next?

The Brookings Institution opined in 2011:

Education has played an important role in the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa with many commentators noting that educated youth have been integral to what has come to be called the “Arab spring.” However, what they fail to mention is that spending many years in school has failed to give many Arab youth a good education. These revolutions were not propagated by well-educated youth; these uprisings were spurred by the needs and demands of poorly educated youth, whose knowledge and skills do not meet the demands of a rapidly-advancing world.... [Despite near universal access to education,] there has been very low return on investment in terms of meaningful educational outcomes. Education systems throughout the region are hindered by low quality, irrelevancy and inequity.

Next stop: American Spring?

Report from a Social Distance: Week 4

Dispatch from a scapegrace stuck in a rabbit warren

"Black Rabbit of Inlé" by Ken Whytock CC BY-NC 2.0

Isolation is now a way of life, and the days are dissolving, each into the next.  There's a plateau in new infections in U.S. hot spot New York, but it sits at a high level of daily mortality.  Testing in the United States remains limited to detecting active infection in the symptomatic, if that, though antibody detection is being deployed experimentally.  Like in other states, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo has ordered that face coverings be worn in shops and workplaces to slow down contagion.  (Another executive order refined the suspension of public meetings and records laws to balance access and lockdown.)  In times like these, as Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said to Trevor Noah, "Humor is kind of the unifying thing."  In that Light(foot)hearted vein, this is what I'm up to.

TV Quote of the Week: “I didn’t believe I’d ever see my racist Aunt Ida licking up gasoline at the Arco station on Saticoy with her Filipino nurse from the Jewish Home for the aging, but it happened.  Anything is possible now.”  —Principal Burr in Daybreak s1e06

What I’m Reading

Scott Johnston, Campusland (2019) (Amazon).  Kirkus Reviews called this self-described “satire” of university life, “richly imagined.”  Well, no disrespect to Scott Johnston’s very enjoyable writing, but if I have a criticism here, it’s that what passes for parody is often less absurd than the reality.  Johnston, a New York Yalie with an eclectic background, spins a tale of PCism run amuck at a fictional elite northeastern private university from varied student, faculty, and admin perspectives.  It’s funny when Johnston depicts a “bias response” star chamber investigating a professor on contrived charges of racism, but the casual reader might not realize how on point the narrative is.  It’s equally absurd yet true when Johnston writes about a weaponized “title IX” being wielded as a verb.[*]

King Solomon
by Kristian Zahrtmann

Our church Bible reading continues in week 14 with 2 Samuel and 1 Kings.  As usual, the BibleProject has an excellent video overview of the books of Kings.  The books begin with the reign of Solomon, who, anointed as king, pleaded with God: "But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties. Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number. So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?"  1 Kings 3:7-9.  Remember when humility in leadership was a thing?

What I’m Watching

Onward (2020) (trailer).  This beautiful new story from Disney Pixar more or less skipped theaters because of the pandemic lockdown.  It’s now included on Disney+ and available to rent on other platforms.  Be prepared to reallocate some of your precious tissues to mop up tears of joy.  As usual for Disney features, the voice cast is top shelf.  Lead female roles bring together comedy legend Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Oscar winner Octavia Spencer.  Lead male voices are two Peters of Avengers fame, Quill (Star-Lord) and Parker (Spider-Man), that is, Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.

Motherless Brooklyn (2019) (trailer).  I thoroughly enjoyed this book by Jonathan Lethem (Amazon), and I'm a big fan of Ed Norton, who was born in Boston and grew up in Maryland, so I eagerly awaited this theatrical release—though not as earnestly as Ed Norton awaited it, the film adaptation being his 20-year passion project.  It did not disappoint.  Norton himself played the protagonist with a performance reminiscent of his genius alongside Brando and De Niro in The Score.  Michael Kenneth Williams, The Wire’s Omar, gets to be a mostly good guy for a change, the enigmatic “trumpet man.”  There are small but significant roles, too, for Robert Wisdom, another Wire alum (“Bunny”), and Fisher Stevens, who seems to be in everything, but whom I’ll always identify favorably with Early Edition.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) (trailer).  What do you really know about Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi?  The Star Wars movies show us only dramatic highlights of their lives.  At some point, Skywalker and Kenobi, together with Master Yoda, waged war, and their bond was forged in that fire.  Such is the story of The Clone Wars, set between live-action episodes II (Attack of the Clones (2002)) and III (Revenge of the Sith (2005)).  Friends have told me for years to embrace this animated saga, and now I’m sucked in.  Best part?  Seven seasons of televised series (2008-14, 2020) followed this 2008 film, Disney+ having revived the show for a finale season this year.  So I’m going to need a clone to watch all of that.  I’m giving a miss to the earlier three-season animation (no “The” in the subtitle) that ran from 2003 to 2005; it was pre-CGI.

Watership Down (2018) (BBC trailer).  The animation is superb in this BBC-Netflix co-production.  With James McAvoy as Hazel, this four-installment adaptation is not the first to adapt to screen the Richard Adams’s 1972 classic (N.Y. Times Mag.).  A 1978 British animated film won a Saturn Award; Art Garfunkel sang “Bright Eyes” for it.  A British-Canadian animated series ran for three seasons, from 1999 to 2001, but never aired in the United States.  Two years ago, we postponed watching this Netflix incarnation because, for an animation about bunnies, it’s heavy emotional lifting.  As James Parker wrote of the novel for The Atlantic, “An unprecedented mash-up of eco-anxiety, homely bottom-of-the-garden anthropomorphism, real violence, and febrile mythmaking, Watership Down struck a nerve.”  That’s only more true of this miniseries in our present era of climate change, pandemic, and xenophobia.

The Night Of (2016) (HBO).  I’m not usually one for what is essentially a criminal procedural, even if well crafted.  But this 2016 production came recommended by a reliable source, and I couldn't resist John Turturro as a scruffy, docks-trolling criminal defense lawyer who’s smarter than anyone gives him credit for.  The show is one part Oz and one part The Practice, spiced with a pinch of The Verdict.  Michael Kenneth Williams is in this one, too, as a scary prison gang leader, and so is Fisher Stevens, who has some darkly funny scenes as pharmacist to Turturro’s eczema-afflicted attorney.

Tales from the Loop (2020) (Amazon).  We’ve just started this new release from Amazon Prime, and I’m all in.  I do not fully understand how a crowd-funded book of surreal science-fiction art by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag in 2015 got turned into first a role-playing game (2017) and then this TV show.  I think it best not to ask too many questions.  Critics have knocked the show for being slow, and ordinarily, slow plays poorly with me.  But Legion alum Nathaniel Halpern wrote these odd and beautiful stories, and, at just e03 of 8, I’m spellbound with anticipation of more.  Halpern mixes the classical wonder of Amazing Stories Magazine with the playful ingenuity of Stranger Things to serve up a premise irresistible to those of us reared on dandelion wine.

Give it a miss:  I’ve liked Ed Helms since he worked for Jon Stewart, but, save a line here and there, Netflix's Coffee & Kareem (2020) was unwatchably unfunny.

Also out now:  We just discovered that Apple TV+ has made some of its top original content free during lockdown, so check it out.

What I’m Eating

Our Easter feast was simple but delicious: ham, potatoes, peas, and homemade bread.  My wife made my late aunt’s annual springtime-classic peach pie for dessert: brilliant, even though we could find only canned peaches.

My gifted wife also this week made chicken garam masala on basmati rice, a favorite in our house.  In the past, she has made the garam masala herself, from its component spices, but products such as McCormick’s, used here, are a satisfying convenience.

Image by BlackRiv from Pixabay

Fortunately, some Cara Cara oranges made it from tree to home: thanks to my mom and stepdad for a fortifying Easter gift.

I picked up cactus-fruit jelly in North Africa, and it’s been chilling in the fridge.  Faced with an abundance of fresh bread this week, we cracked it open.  Not bad.  Tastes like … I don’t know, cactus fruit.

What I’m Drinking

Alto Grande.  “The coffee of Popes and Kings,” this premium bean, grown in “ideal soil and climate conditions” in Puerto Rico’s mountainous interior, makes a brew too bold for the coffee novice.  We’re indebted to a family friend (Twitter) for our supply line.

Rhody Coyote Hard Apple Cider.  Celebrating Easter, we opened this harvest holdover from nearby Newport Vineyards. When things get back to normal, there's a tasting room.

Chicory Root Vodka.  The flavored liquors of Philadelphia’s Art in the Age distillery never disappoint. The New Hampshire-drawn maple syrup eclipses the chicory in this vodka, but the balance is delectably sippable.  Also a tasting room in better times.

Scapegrace Gin.  How often does a gin teach you a new word?  “Scapegrace” originated in the 18th century to mean a rogue or rascal: one who escapes God’s grace.  Unironically, the name attached to this gin when New Zealand maker Rogue Society Distilling went international and confronted Oregon-based Rogue Ales in a European trademark tangle.  Thus this small-batch brand means to make its mark with a rough-and-tumble reputation in a dark bottle that pays homage to gin’s progenitor genever.  A suite of botanicals is led by juniper.  Different accounts locate distillation in Auckland or Christchurch; either way, Scapegrace boasts water from New Zealand’s Southern Alps.  But be warned: the gold variety, which we have, packs a navy-strength punch: at 57% ABV, it’ll make you forget all the new words you just learned.  The classic silver weighs in at 42.2% ABV.  I am keen to get my paws on some of “the world’s first naturally black gin,” Scapegrace Black, 41.6% ABV.

Whom I’m Wearing

Chartwell Wealth Management.  Contact my friend Dan Harrington (LinkedIn) for financial advice in Rhode Island/South Coast.  Dan wrote the ProJo op-ed on quarantine that I cited here on the blog a couple of weeks ago, with art by Dan’s talented daughter, Grace.  This fashion choice puts me in good company: Dan’s and my friend Komlan N. Aloysh sported a Chartwell T to launch his new YouTube channel, on which he interviews “African changemakers both on the continent and in the diaspora.”


Happy birthday to my dear wife, and happy Earth Day!

Eating, Drinking, and Wearing images except oranges are mine, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

[*UPDATE, April 19: To give credit to the author where due: I've since finished the book, and, in an afterword, Johnston wrote that "while Campusland is written as satire, it doesn't stretch the truth by much, and sometimes not at all.  Title IX, as depicted, is true to life.  If you want some good nonfiction on the subject, I suggest Laura Kipnis's excellent (and horrifying) book Unwanted Advances [(2017) (Amazon)]."]