wisconsin

Does anyone really understand this sport? Even the guys playing it seem kind of confused...

It's that time of year. I love ice cream. I have to pretend not to like it, actually, or I would eat too much! Like most people, I have very clearly defined preferences, too. I love soft serve. I love jimmies on top. I am capable of thoroughly enjoying a sundae. Mint chocolate chip was my favorite as a kid, but I have evolved since then... So let's haiku about ice cream this week! Here, I will go first: At Baskin-Robbins I waited patiently for Two cold scoops of joy. Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 syllable formula and have some fun!

Recently, I read two books at the same time and after awhile I saw something wonderful: that they fit together in a striking way. Both were written by people I know, and both books are compelling, important, and timely. Alice Marie Johnson's "After Life: My Journey From Incarceration to Freedom" is an engrossing story that will convince you that our criminal justice system has gone terribly awry as it reveals how one woman became enmeshed in--and survived--a grossly disproportionate sentence. Rachel Elise Barkow's "Prisoners of Politics," in turn, offers a comprehensive description of how that system became so dysfunctional and (perhaps more importantly) describes a path to fixing the problem. After Life: My Journey from Incarceration to Freedom Alice Marie Johnson  Like a lot of people, I think Alice Marie Johnson is one of the most important people in my field right now. This book is one of the reasons why. In clear strokes, she paints a picture of her ow

As I promised last week, I'm going to take every Wednesday to explore the career paths of some of my law school classmates, a particularly interesting bunch. For my first profile, I've selected Kathleen Clark, a law professor and expert on government, ethics, and national security. When we were in law school, Kathleen was kind to me when I was clueless, something I have always been grateful for. She was one of the sharpest people in the group, and when she raised her hand you knew something compelling and true was about to be said.  She was a double Yalie-- undergrad and law school-- so she knew her way around, too. I've been lucky enough to see her occasionally since school, too, most recently when she was kind enough to come hear Nkechi Taifa and I talk about reparations with Dr. Joanne Braxton earlier this month. After law school, Kathleen clerked for Judge Harold Greene, and then served as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. As a professor, she got tenure at Was

This time, right now, the end of May, is when I miss Texas the most. It's been in the 90's for a while now in Waco, most years, but the pool just opened; the kids got out of school. The start of summer really means something when you live in Central Texas. The crickets are loud at night, the heat can take your breath away when you go outside, and everything is, in a word, languid. I love that word, the way it is used in the mesmerizing Steely Dan song, "Deacon Blues," which has a 70's vibe in precisely the way that Waco does, singing about the "languid and bittersweet." There is something about dusk this time of year, there. People on a porch, or at the pool, or out on a ranch, just being, as the heat breaks a little bit, the light hitting just right. You go to the pool. Someone orders margaritas, and they talk about hunting javelina, that you have to deal with that thick hide and use a knife sometimes, out in some sweltering patch of South Texas. A few

Wow! Lot's of great lunch-themed haikus last week. First we had this from the Spanish Medievalist: Menu del día  Gazpacho, filete, y Arroz con leche. [Translation: Today's menu Gazpacho filleted with Real Human milk] Tim brought the Michigan angle: Oh, Buddys pizza You have moved to Grand Rapids What took you so long? And Susan Stabile offered something close to my own heart: On white bread (of course) peanut butter and jelly each day in grade school. Christine offered up a common conundrum: Chicken salad, chips... An unremarkable meal Need inspiration. Amy gave us a great picture: Italian Alps, home of distant family, June: Long tables loaded, wild boar stew, fresh -- Love --  polenta gorgonzola --  Surprise -- tomatoes, greens -- Warmth -- pasta, new peas, new family, fizzy water, wine and wine --  Flowers -- Laughter -- chocolate, pears, parmesan. Cannot recreate . . . And Gavin, as always, gave us something worthy of thought: I eat at my desk Bland food from a cardboard box

I'm finding it hard not to notice empty or abandoned churches wherever I go. Sometimes they have been converted into apartments. Recently, in DC, I had dinner with Joanne Braxton and some others in a restaurant/hotel that was built out of a former church. More often, they are just boarded up. It's especially striking in rural areas, where the old church is just falling apart under the elements. In many European cities, you can find a church every few blocks. If you are there on a Sunday, it is easy to find a seat as they are almost empty during services. Christianity is fading as a moral force in this world. There have, of course, been a number of self-inflicted wounds that have led to this fate. Almost any terrible act that you can think of-- supporting the Nazis, massive sexual abuse of children, taking the money of the impoverished--- has been committed by Christian churches and their authorities. Some will blame a shift in culture, of course: that new media and entertainmen

The best song for the end of spin class? This one. Absolutely.

People labor over dinner-- for whatever reason, it is the meal people worry over the most, and most often share with those close to them. Breakfast wants attention, but doesn't always get it. No one really thinks it is the "most important meal of the day," and lots of people ignore it entirely. Lunch is somewhere in the middle (in more ways than one). I have been all over the map regarding lunch in the course of my life. Right now, it is usually pretty utilitarian: I need food and so I go to a place that sells food and buy some. Then I eat it. But, at other times in my life lunch has borne more significance. I would love to get back to that, actually.  Let's haiku about lunch-- what you eat, who you share it with, what it means, maybe the best one of your life. Here, I will go first: Texas barbecue Eaten on the back porch, hot Gotta love Vitek's. Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 syllable formula and have some fun!

Yesterday, President Trump had a meeting at the White House with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The topic was to be a new infrastructure initiative. It appears that the following things happened: 1) Pelosi and Schumer showed up, along with some other congressional leaders. 2) President Trump said that he wasn't going to deal with them until they concluded investigations into his administration. 3) Then President Trump left the room. 4) In the Rose Garden, Trump gave a press conference at a podium bearing the words "NO COLLUSION. NO OBSTRUCTION." 5) The press went nuts. Headlines blared things like "Dems react to Trump-Pelosi feud!" So, really, nothing of substance happened here. They had a non-meeting. The thing is, Donald Trump has learned how to control the narrative. And he controls it the way a reality show contestant does: by creating drama, and then letting others talk about it. At some point, the press bears so

Hearing no objections, starting next Wednesday I'm going to start profiling the people I went to law school with. I have begun to do some digging around, and the more I find the more intriguing the project becomes. There is a fascinating variety of stories, and an amazing array of paths that have been followed from that one point in place and time. One thing I have found intriguing already is the different ways in which we seem to have defined and pursued success. Some, from the start, sought power. Others sought meaning, or to create social good. For some, probably, financial security was paramount, and it is clear that some chose family above everything else. And, of course, for a lot of us there is a mix of things. Seeking power and social good, for example, need not be mutually exclusive (though they do create tension if they are pursued simultaneously, I suspect). And, of course, some people found success in a place or doing something that they did not intend to end up in. Tha

Not long ago, I was thinking about all the remarkable people I got to share law school with. Some of them are famous, a few are infamous, and all of them are fascinating. Over the past year, I've had the opportunity to re-connect with a number of them, and it reminded me of what an unusual crowd that was. My idea is to pick one of those classmates to profile on, say, Wednesday of every week. What do you think?

I love what people did with this (though I thought more people would have bus stories!). We had all four directions of the country represented. First, from the West, this from DDR: The school bus driver Was a true alcoholic And yet we lived. CTL remembered a bus in the East (Philadelphia): SEPTA buses are  Zoos on wheels, but where people, Not apes, throw feces.   The Medievalist has a most Minnesota reflection: Riding the school bus, Going north to Grand Marais, Lutherans canoeing. And, probably my favorite, Christine rode the bus in the South: Caught bus in Daytona Moon lit skies, snow covered fields A red-eye ride home.

Yesterday was commencement at UST law. Because the students chose me as the "Professor of the Year," I got the honor of being the person who puts the academic hood on each student as they cross the stage. It is actually a tricky job. I'm not an especially tall guy, so it's a challenge to get it over the heads of some of the taller folks, and if you do it wrong it starts to look like a version of human ring toss. Those hats aren't too stable, either, and there is a real danger of knocking them off. And, of course, since the student is facing away from you, there is a good chance of putting the hood over their face instead of around their neck. At this commencement there was a special challenge, too: it was held at Westminster Presbyterian Church downtown, and the passageway by the pulpit where we did the hooding was very narrow, and fronted on a five-foot drop. There was a very low one-foot rail by the edge. There was a pretty good chance that if I messed up, some

Yesterday, I happened to be in central Iowa (you know how that goes-- sometimes you just can't avoid doing some business in central Iowa). After a little research, I found that Montana Governor and just-announced presidential candidate Steve Bullock was doing a "meet and greet" at Uncle Nancy's Coffeehouse in Newton, Iowa, so I headed over there. My hope was to ask him how he would use the constitutional pardon power (since that is kind of my thing , as you probably know). Newton is an interesting town, best known as the onetime home of the Maytag Corporation. Maytag moved most of its operations to Mexico, merged with Whirlpool, and then just went away entirely, so this is a community that paid the price of internationalization. I would imagine the appeal of Donald Trump and "America First" would be pretty strong here, though the town does seem to have survived fairly well by diversifying its economy. It was good to see the Hotel Maytag being restored as w

I heard a short presentation today about new electric buses coming into service here in Minneapolis-- $1.5 million buses! Sometimes I'll take the bus to work, and in the past I have taken some longer trips on the bus (as have most people... and isn't it weird that we refer to any kind of bus in the simple singular, ie "the bus?"). We all have a bus story. Let's make them into haiku. Here, I will go first: I sat with Fournier All the way to Iowa Epic adventure. Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 formula, and have some fun!

Just because I can (and also kinda because I will be in the area anyways) tomorrow morning I am going to head over to Uncle Nancy's Coffeehouse in Newton, Iowa for a meet n' greet with Montana Governor Steve Bullock, who as of this week is running for president. Perhaps I will get to meet "Uncle Nancy" too!   That election is a long ways away, though, and we still have time to think more broadly about bigger issues.  At the broadest level, I was captivated by a book review in the New York Times by David From. He was reviewing Adam Gopnick's book "A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism." At the center of the piece, this quote from the book jumped right out at me: “The basic American situation in which the right wing wants cultural victories and gets nothing but political ones; while the left wing wants political victories and gets only cultural ones. … The left manages to get sombreros banned from college parties while every federal

I'm not a huge golf fan. I think the use of land for golf courses in some places (ie, Los Angeles) is pretty ridiculous, and it drives me bananas to see it on TV, with the whispering announcers and tracking shots of a tiny white ball someplace against a herky-jerky sky. Still, I have to admit that it does have some fascinating personalities floating around. For the last three decades one of them has been John Daly, who was just approved to ride a cart for the PGA Championship, drawing a rebuke from Tiger Woods, who recalled that he walked the course (and won that tournament) on a broken leg. Daly has a variety of ailments that make walking difficult, and I don't begrudge him the cart (though, again, I don't know much about this sport and its traditions, so I probably should not have an opinion at all). Daly is a character: probably the only pro golfer to be arrested for public drunkenness in the parking lot of a Hooter's restaurant, he claims to have lost over $50,000,0

In the little academic world I work within, Ronald Sullivan, Jr. is a big deal. When I started thinking about clemency work-- in 2009-- he was the first person I met with. Sullivan is a Harvard Law Professor who runs a fantastic clinic there; many of the people I have worked with were his students at one time or another. He and his wife have also served as the Deans of one of Harvard's residential colleges for undergraduates, Winthrop House. It's a job that includes a certain amount of leading, counseling, and inspiring the undergrads, and usually means living in the dorm with them. Like me, Sullivan sometimes works as a lawyer on behalf of clients embroiled in criminal law (mine are all pro bono; I am not sure if his work is pro bono or paid).  Recently, he took on the representation of Harvey Weinstein, and that is when things got weird , according to the NY Times. Students protested Sullivan's work with Weinstein, who is accused of a series of sexual assaults. There was

I love when haiku reflect the writer; the kind of thing that no one else could have done. And there were two like that last week, on the subject of rain. First, there was this from Christine: I smell it, nearing... Slight breezes ruffle the leaves Raindrops hit my cheeks. And then there is this from (naturally) the Spanish Medievalist: The rain in Spain falls On the just and unjust alike, Just made this one up.

It's a weird holiday, isn't it? Here is why: I don't think we ever fully realize what it is that our mothers have given us. We see the obvious stuff--advice, the provisions of life-- but there is always something deeper in play, too. Our moms, in a million different ways, crafted who we become. Sometimes it was intentional, and sometimes it was not. For me, that is all to the good. One thing about my mom that is remarkable is that she always tries to see the best in everyone; she takes no pleasure in anyone's tragedies. That is such a rare quality today.  When I am tempted to do otherwise (a temptation I sometimes succumb to), I hear her voice urging the better way. There is no one thing that can be said about all mothers, other than this: they mattered.

Clemency in the form of a commutation (shortening of sentence) is, in a way, a delicate social pact between the executive and someone in prison. The president is counting on the person receiving the commutation to hold up their end of the deal and take advantage of the mercy they have been shown. That's why it is discouraging to read things like this piece in the Waco paper , which describes Ricky Lamont Garrett's commutation, re-arrest, and conviction. I'm surprised he got clemency under the Obama program, given its supposed limits, and saddened by his poor choices once he received that gift of freedom. He evaded police and was found with three bags of ecstasy. One incident, though, does not indict the entire project. The truer metric will be to compare redivism rates of those who received clemency with those who served a full term. That work hasn't been done yet, and I won't go beyond discouragement based on one case until we see that.

Traditional haiku often deals with nature themes, and I get pretty far afield here at the Razor. Let's try it out this week, though. This is the time of year when rain sweeps in and makes everything green (at least in Minnesota). I love the way it looks and feels.  Here, I will go first: There is a sound, first A gentle whoosh, and it's here Cat footsteps appear. Now it is your turn! Use the 5/7/5 syllable pattern, and have some fun!

I have a theory. Over the past several days, the Trump administration has pretty much stopped providing anything to the House of Representatives' committees that conducting investigations. Most recently, the administration asserted executive privilege over the Mueller report, and the House Judiciary Committee held Attorney General William Barr in contempt over the move. It's hard not to  think that a directive from the top has come down: give them nothing.  I don't think it is the "Constitutional Crisis" some are declaring; the Constitution says almost nothing about any of this. I know... it does create a separation of powers generally, and there are cases upholding the House's ability to subpoena the president, but I don't think we can call something a Constitutional Crisis unless there is a threat to something clearly within that document. So, anyways, my theory: I suspect that this administration would welcome impeachment on the current facts, and are i

I remember watching Saturday Night Live in the 1970's, when the original cast (John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Garrett Morris, Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Lorraine Newman) were just creating something that people loved. It was a cultural phenomenon.  Then, in 1980, they all left. For a lot of people, that ushered in a dark period for the show, where the product did not live up to expectations set by that original cast. Looking back at it, though, it is pretty remarkable who appeared as cast members during that period, some of them for only one season before getting booted. Check out this partial list of cast member from 1980-87: Billy Crystal Joan Cusack Robert Downey, Jr. Christine Ebersole Gilbert Gottfried Christopher Guest Julia Louis-Dreyfuss Jon Lovitz Laurie Metcalf Anthony Michael Hall Dennis Miller Eddie Murphy Joe Piscapo Randy Quaid Harry Shearer Martin Short Daman Wayans

If you live in or around DC, I hope you will be able to come to something I have been looking forward to for weeks. Tonight, Dr. Joanne Braxton will moderate a discussion between Nkechi Taifa and I about the idea of reparations for African-American communities. It's a complicated and important issue-- just the type I love to talk about. We'll get things going at 6, and it's all happening at the Potter's House in Adams-Morgan. You can get all the details here .

Ah, summer! And the wacky travel it can bring. There were some wonderful haiku on the subject this week. For example, we had this from the Spanish Medievalist (which I suppose makes sense, right?): Madrid summer sun, Old medieval monuments, Steaming paella. Jill Scoggins has a dream-- like, a real nighttime dream-- about this: From my dreams last night: A Portuguese jewel hued sun soaked palace. Why? And I loved this evocative poem by CTL: Salty ocean breeze  Fills the lungs, soaks up troubles, Carries them away. 

Over the course of my life, I have failed to achieve many things I really desired in that moment. Sometimes, it hurt a lot to have failed. In my early 20's, having graduated from college, I really struggled to find my footing. I tried very hard to get a job as a copywriter at an ad agency, and got nowhere. A few place asked for more information; I provided it and then never heard from them again. After a while, I tried to get almost any decent-paying job that would allow me some financial independence. Again and again, I was turned down.  When I tried to get a job with Northwest Airlines as a gate agent or flight attendant, I didn't make it past the first round. My self-esteem was dragging. Eventually, I took a low-paying, no-status job doing menial jobs for a law firm, including working as a process server.  Probably, I wasn't that good at it, in part because I read over everything I was handling, fascinated. Which, of course, led to law school. When we fail, we often thin

Like many others, I have recently learned how to pronounce Pete Buttigieg's last name ("Boot Edge-edge)") and a handful of other things about him. Will he be the Democratic nominee for president? It seems pretty unlikely. But, of course, at this point in the campaign it seemed pretty unlikely that Donald Trump would be the nominee of the Republicans in 2016.  I am glad to see a Democrat talk openly and comfortably about faith. A lot of Democratic candidates and elected officials seem to have faith lives that are important to them, but few ever talk about that-- which cedes the field to Republicans and their allies like Jerry Falwell, Jr. Of course, a lot of people would prefer that politicians never talk about religion, but that's short-sighted. Given that many Americans are still guided by faith in their values and (sometimes) their actions, if we don't talk about this we won't know the true beliefs of our public officials.

We all have fantasies of going someplace amazing this summer-- I know that I do. Whether it is something spectacular (Africa, Australia) or more mundane (camping in a quiet wood), let's haiku about that this week! Here, I will go first: At a cabin, on An island, with some good folks And Pink Unicorn.  Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 syllable formula, and have some fun!

After a period of seemingly just hoping all this would go away (and who can blame him), James Comey decided to opine on current events in the New York Times. It's a pretty remarkable piece, which you can read here . Focusing on William Barr, whose testimony yesterday in the Senate was probably hailed within the White House and has been subject to much debate outside of it, is the primary target of Comey's op-ed, though he also loops in Rod Rosenstein and (more generously) Jim Mattis. His question, verbatim, is this: "What happened to these people?" His conclusion is pretty stunning, and not just because he slips into the second person perspective. Let's face it-- eating souls is a fairly out-there allegation! Here is the ending, the uncoiling of the snake, where Comey includes himself among those who have gone along with it all: Speaking rapid-fire with no spot for others to jump into the conversation, Mr. Trump makes everyone a co-conspirator to his preferred set