Like so much else Trump has done, he’s turned what was once a great department into a fucking mess. And it frankly breaks my heart.
robertreich.substack.com/p/goodbye-and-good-ridda...
"If" interested, Cyril Welch's new (2026) translation of Being and Time, exceptional clarity (some have opined at unfair expense), including footnote annotations - a few pages sampling its quasi-analytic approach.
A lie that can no longer be challenged becomes insane. The totalitarian ideological pronouncement obliterates reality as well as purpose; nothing exists but what it says exists.
-- Guy Debord (1967)
Martin Jay's 2020 essay examines the tension between "theory" and "philosophy" (aka continental vs analytic), pondering the insufficiencies in each and advocating humility in both camps coupled with dialectical interaction that draws on one another's strengths.
The autodidact Mohammed Aziz at his bookshop, Bouquiniste El Azizi, in the old Medina of Morocco’s capital city Rabat.
Intent on writing a book on freedom, Lon Fuller was waylaid by the academic community's interest in his 1958 exchange with HLA Hart, hence detoured into developing those views via his 1963 Storrs jurisprudence lectures at Yale, in turn culminating in The Morality of Law.
If the opportunity for litigants to be heard and a commitment to reason-based judicial decision-making are core components of the rule of law, then Chief Justice Roberts wholly abandoned this rule of law commitment in creating the shadow docket in 2016.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...
Tidy editorial paragraph in The Anarchist Review of Books (Issue #11, 2026)
"My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people. Reading had taken me away for long periods at a time, yet I still had to deal with the streets and the authorities and the cold."
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2...
The current conservative claim, purporting to justify illiberal rule, that the US is "a republic not a democracy" elides the distinction Hanna Pitkin and others made between a subjugating Hobbesian "absolute representation" and participatory representative government.
Authorities can, without great risk, ignore the dispersed expression of individual opinions, but they cannot as easily disregard crowds in the streets, however peaceable, or petitions with thousands of signatures.
-- Bernard Manin
What is most needed in confronting the official abuse of power is the sense that the certification of something as legally valid is not conclusive of the question of obedience, and however great its aura of authority its demands must be submitted to moral scrutiny.
-- HLA Hart
Positive law is always flawed insofar as it serves interests which are not required by public safety but are nevertheless entrenched in the unequal power structure of the social order.
-- Ian Angus
Looking at the moon is great, but here's proof that living on the moon would be better
Gramsci penned his Prison Notebooks, Bertrand Russell found his 1918 prison solitude "quite agreeable" to writing his Intro to Mathematical Philosophy, Malcolm X transformed in prison, and the anarchist Piotr Kropotkin thanked the chance "leisure of imprisonment" for his climate science work.
Amazing 20 Oct 1965 correspondence from Hannah Arendt to Mary McCarthy re return to her original dissertation Love and Saint Augustine
In Art of Rhetoric Aristotle gives some good lawerly advice on not getting carried away during cross-examination
I didn't really believe the labeling hype when I bought these expensive dried chilies yesterday, and I think I still don't, but have learned one thing, you don't want to crush an entire pod into a pan of scrambled eggs if you want to taste your coffee.
Walter Benjamin opined that one's modern insights should never assume that historical types eg "the Renaissance" can grasp the periods conceptually and discretely, because source materials arise from the interests of the historical moment "and not by historiographic ideas."
More importantly, ya wanna write a little amicus?
Shortened schedule taken as a good sign
For a nuanced and scholarly view on the currently vulgarized contrast between "representative" government via a republic vs government by (direct/indirect) "democracy", recommending Bernard Manin's now classic text (1997).
If interested in disrupting your entire week, J Chhabria has issued this order in the Roundup lit permitting all amicus filings, support for motions to enjoin the Mo class cert due April 16 (unfair re notice, futures, &c) -- @alahav.bsky.social , @eburch.bsky.social , @profadamszimmerman.bsky.social
1959 Twilight Zone
Think Coffee & Codex Books, @ Bowery & Bleecker nyc, "That's Really All You Need"
Philosophy is criticism and the superseding of 'common sense'. In this respect it coincides with 'good' as opposed to 'common' sense.
-- Antonio Gramsci
There is not a crevice in the cliff of the established order into which the ironist might hook a fingernail.
-- Theodor Adorno
For HLA Hart, debating Hans Kelsen in 1961 "made me understand better the point of certain Kelsenian doctrines which had long perplexed me," and for Kelsen the debate motivated him to consider afresh "the possibility that one norm might logically conflict with another."
The "affluent society" (1958) based on (1) abundant capacity and luxury goods, (2) a rising standard of living, (3) concentrations of power and gov't intervention, (4) scientific and pseudoscientific study and manipulation of private behavior for political & commercial purposes.
