"Few approve of how Donald Trump is handling the cost of living" – Overall: 33-67 – Immigration: 40-59 – Iran: 32-67 – Economy: 30-70 – Cost of living: 23(!)-76 "The nationwide poll was conducted April 16-20, 2026 using the AmeriSpeak® Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Online and telephone interviews using landlines and cell phones were conducted with 2,596 adults. The overall margin of sampling error is +/- 3.4 percentage points."

There's no other way to say it: This AP-NORC poll is atrocious for Trump.

– Overall: 33-67
– Immigration: 40-59
– Iran: 32-67
– Economy: 30-70
– Cost of living: 23(!)-76

37% of Republicans disapprove of his handling of the economy, 47% disapprove on cost of living.

apnorc.org/projects/few...

This all seems rather suboptimal

High Court Independence vs. Term Length High court independence is the 2013–2023 average of scores from a survey of experts for the Varieties of Democracy project. Vertical lines represent the average confidence intervals for each country. Average confidence interval for the United States is shaded in gray and extended across to illustrate overlap with those of other countries. Note: V-Dem "High court independence” scores are provided annually by country experts on the following question: “When the high court in the judicial system is ruling in cases that are salient to the government, how often would you say that it makes decisions that merely reflect government wishes regardless of its sincere view of the legal record? Responses: 0=Always; 1=Usually; 2 =About half of the time; 3=Seldom; 4=Never."

High Court Term Length High court term lengths of the United States and a diverse set of peer democracies. All countries in the list except for the United States have terms that are either fixed by law or capped by a mandatory retirement age. United States 28.2 Norway 15.2 Brazil 13.8 Australia 13.3 Canada 12.2 Germany 12 South Africa 12 Sweden 10.7 Czechia 10 Chile 9 France 9 Italy 9 Portugal 9 Spain 9 United Kingdom 7.6* Switzerland 6 South Korea 6 Japan 5.6

Life Tenure for U.S. Supreme Court Justices Is a Global Oddity with Clear Costs Compared to other democracies, the United States is an outlier in granting life tenure to justices, producing diminishing returns and mounting costs.

www.brennancenter.org/our-work/ana...

"The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics" is absolutely a banger but it is a banger that takes like 10 minutes to explain to someone not familiar with the relevant history

"History must record my witticisms"

Not totally sure why Holmes wrote a separate dissent when he just says the same thing as the other dissenters, but in a more pithy fashion

The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics

Really this sentence from Holmes is all you need as a response

I'm excited to share that we've made a collection of historic Supreme Court Records and Briefs available via
@archive.org

I've written a blog post where I go into detail about the importance of this collection.

blog.archive.org/2026/04/20/u...

I cut off the next sentence which (comically) reads: "But are we all, on that account, at the mercy of legislative majorities?"

We think the limit of the police power has been reached and passed in this case.- There is, in our judgment, no reasonable foundation for holding this to be necessary or appropriate as a health law to safeguard the public health or the health of the individuals who are-following the trade of a baker. If this statute be valid, and if,, therefore, a proper case is made out in which to deny the right of an individual, suz jurms, as employer or employ6, to make contracts for the labor of the latter under the protection of the provisions of the Federal Constitution, there would seem to be no length to which legislation of this nature might not go. The case differs widely, as we have already stated, from the expressions of this court in regard to laws of this nature, as stated in Holden v Hardy and Jacobson v Massachusetts, supra. We think that there can be no fair doubt that the trade of a baker, in and of itself, is not an unhealthy one to that degree which would authorize the legislature to interfere with the right to labor, and with the right of free contract on the part of the individual, either as employer or employ6. In looking through statistics regarding all trades and occupations, it may be true that the trade of a baker does not appear to be as healthy as some other trades, and is also vastly more healthy than still others. To the common understanding the trade of a baker has never been regarded as an unhealthy one. Very likely physicians would not recommend the exercise of that or of any other trade as a remedy for ill health. Some occupations are riore healthy than others, but we think there are none which might not come under the power of the legislature to supervise and control the hours of working therein, if the mere fact that the occupation is not absolutely and perfectly healthy is to confer that right upon the legislative department of the Government. It might be safely affirmed that almost all occupations more or less affect the health. There must be…

Reading through Lochner, and I am shocked that arguments like "if a legislature can legitimately enforce a 10 hour workday, then it must be able to legitimately enact any legislation it wants" and "legislatures may only regulate the most unhealthy occupations" didn't stand the test of time

I'm writing a thing attempting to explain what I think does and doesn't count as "eugenics," and the conclusion I am somewhat reluctantly pushing myself towards is basically "nothing is eugenics, except transhumanism"

If I were a libertarian academic I would write a bad law review article and title it "Justice as Laissez Faireness"

More like laissez unfaire if you ask me

Im not opposed to that lol

Unfortunately I went from evangelical fundamentalist circles to atheist circles and neither of those groups care much about the differences between Christian denominations

I don't know enough about episcopalians to be surprised by information like that!

I know nothing about him except what I've learned from Sprinkle's introduction

He was getting there. If he got another 0.75 seasons he could've been killed off in a more predictable but more satisfying manner in the finale though!

In this house, we believe:
gas should be more expensive
parking should be more expensive
plastic should be more expensive
hamburgers should be more expensive
kindness is everything

Their only citation is to Richard B Hayes who I guess used to be homophobic back when he wrote the article they cite but ended up alright much later?

A Flurry of Books on Homosexuality The topic of homosexuality was largely untouched by biblical scholars and theologians until 1980, when John Boswell published his provocative book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.’ Boswell argued that early Christian tradition has always had a place for same-sex couples, and that the Bible forbids only certain forms of exploitative homosexual behavior. Boswell’s book was roundly criticized by biblical scholars,* but it opened the door to a different way to read the Christian Scriptures that would allow for the full inclusion of gay and lesbian couples in the church. Several studies followed in the wake of Boswell. Interestingly, the majority of books written by historians and biblical scholars, while dis- agreeing with several of Boswell’s arguments, also concluded that the Bible’s prohibition of same-sex relations does not address or condemn consensual, monogamous, same-sex marriages.*

"do the relevant academics actually dislike [book I like] or am I just reading conservative propaganda?" is a question I ask myself a lot

Each of our contributors exhibits a high view of Scripture, a commit- ment to the gospel and the church, and a love for people—especially the people who are most affected by this topic. You will not find arguments based on emotional sentimentality or postmodern views of love—‘If you love me, you must affirm everything I desire to do.” If you follow along with a studious mind and compassionate heart, you will see that all of our essayists wrestle deeply with the Bible and theology because they believe that God is the author of Scripture and has mediated his truth to humanity through human writers, a truth that has been refracted and reflected upon through centuries of Christian thinkers.

Yup bad vibes

Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church, edited by Preston Sprinkle (which is his real name and not like a drag name or something)

Should I subject myself to Evangelical writing about homosexuality

5 In "Randomness and Perceived Randomness in Evolutionary Biology," Syn these, XLIII (1980): 287-329, William Wimsatt offers a nice example (296): while the insectivorous bird tracks individual insects, the anteater just averages over the ant-infested area; one might say that, while the bird's manifest image quantifies over insects, 'ant' is a mass term for anteaters. See the discussion of this and related examples in my Elbow Room (Cambridge: MIT, 1984), pp. 108-110.

Sometimes I read facts which I find intriguing despite the fact that I don't really know what they mean

The idiosyncracy of perceivers' capacities to discern patterns is striking. Visual patterns with axes of vertical symmetry stick out like sore thumbs for us, but if one simply rotates the frame a few degrees, the symmetry is often utterly beyond noticing. And the "perspec tives" from which patterns are "perceptible" are not restricted to variations on presentation to the sense modalities. Differences in knowledge yield striking differences in the capacity to pick up pat terns. Expert chess players can instantly perceive (and subsequently recall with high accuracy) the total board position in a real game, but are much worse at recall if the same chess pieces are randomly placed on the board, even though to a novice both boards are equally hard to recall.'3 This should not surprise anyone who considers that an expert speaker of English would have much less difficulty perceiving and recalling The frightened cat struggled to get loose. than Te ser.ioghehnde t srugfcalde go tgtt ohle which contains the same pieces, now somewhat disordered. Expert chess players, unlike novices, not only know how to play chess; they know how to read chess-how to see the patterns at a glance.

"The idiosyncracy of perceivers' capacities to discern patterns is striking"

The Culture Crutch How lazy social scientists and commentators use the c-word to avoid doing their jobs

“When someone says “culture explains X,” they’re gesturing at a black box the size of human civilization and calling the gesture a theory.”

(I don't know why you would present this data as a table instead of a graph. Many such cases)

Table showing that Nazis support in small communities was very religiously split, with Protestants supporting them much more than Catholics, but their urban support was much less religiously split

Interesting table on nazi electoral support