How To Get Into The “Times”: All You Need Is A Tumblr And A Friend (And An Adorable, Messy Child Helps Too)

BREAKING: Kids sure are messy! Luckily, there’s a blog devoted to that very fact, in case you weren’t sure! (And even more luckily for its author, she’s friends with a Times writer who can give said blog a glowing comparison to Erma Bombeck in the Grey Lady’s hallowed pages, thus paving the way for Yet Another Crowdsourced Blog That Might Become Something Resembling A Book. Hooray, Internet! Keep breaking down those walls!)

Bristol Palin’s speaking fee has been set at $15,000 — $30,000 per appearance. Bristol. The daughter. I am not sure why Sarah Palin is so negative about the direction that this country is headed in; clearly, it is working for her family.

Five weeks ago, Casey Greenfield published a piece in the Daily Beast about the Supreme Court, FDR and Obama, drawing from Jeff Shesol’s Supreme Power. This week, so did Jeffrey Toobin, in the New Yorker. Greenfield is the woman who is not Toobin’s wife who is raising the baby she had with him. While their approach and language differs, they come to some of the same conclusions, and even find an identical supporting quote.

Here’s her:

The public found Roosevelt’s jockeying distasteful and even indicative of dictatorial leanings. Shesol acknowledges that FDR here is seen as a “character in a Greek tragedy…blinded by arrogance after his landslide” but argues against hubris as FDR’s prime motivator: “It may have been driven… by ego and emotion, but it was also the product of reason.

Here’s him:

History’s judgment of the court-packing plot has generally been harsh, but Jeff Shesol’s new book on the subject, ‘Supreme Power,’ while acknowledging the conventional view that ego and emotion drove Roosevelt to act, notes that the plan “was also the product of reason.”

Here’s her:

After FDR’s 1936 landslide reelection, he’d had it with a Supreme Court, led by moderate Charles Evans Hughes, that repeatedly struck down his New Deal legislation. Emboldened by his victory, and frustrated by what he saw as unnecessary roadblocks to programs meant to lift the country out of the Great Depression, the president proposed extensive judicial reform legislation in February 1937. The signature component of the bill would have enabled FDR to add up to six additional Justices to the nine-member Supreme Court. FDR-who had not made a single Court appointment during his first term-could have used this expanded flexibility to “pack” the Court with Justices likely to support his legislative agenda.

And here’s him:

Emboldened by a landslide reëlection in 1936, he struck back at the “nine old men” by proposing a change in the structure of the Court: henceforth, the President would name an additional Justice for each one over the age of seventy. The justification was that the new appointees would assist their elderly colleagues with their work, but, as everyone knew, the real motive was to put enough F.D.R. appointees on the Court to allow the New Deal to proceed.

Obviously she omits the dieresis. (Tina Brown’s Daily Beast is not David Remnick’s New Yorker!)

“The parallels between Obama today and FDR in 1938 are in the zillions. The mutual enmity between Obama and Chief Justice Roberts finds precedent in FDR’s animosity toward Chief Justice Hughes” is how Greenfield made the transition to current analogy. “The forty-fourth President is now feeling the pain of the thirty-second” is the tidier version that Toobin went with.

There’s nothing really scandalous there, as you can see. It’s odd. At the very most, it shows that they may have made a good couple, what with their similar legal thinking.

Still, it’s hard to listen to Toobin go on about the law right now; he hired a lawyer to deal with his interactions with Greenfield and this lawyer, back in February, said regarding Greenfield’s paternity claim: “We do not intend to dignify plainly fabricated claims with a response.” The response in the end has actually been for him to pay her child support, so, uh, okay.

And then there’s the actually objectionable part of Toobin’s comment. It’s his odd appeal to the glorious order of Supreme Court precedent. Don’t get too frothy, you liberals, about the ability of the Court to make the country a better place!

Today, liberals applaud when the Supreme Court strikes down federal legislation restricting the rights of detainees at Guantánamo, or a state’s limitations on gay rights, and if the day comes when the Court jettisons Citizens United liberals will be too busy celebrating to remember the primacy of stare decisis. As is so often the case, in courtrooms and elsewhere, the battle between Obama and the Roberts Court is as much about power as it is about principle; neither side is as concerned with abstract concepts like activism and restraint as it is with winning.

Well, oy. Primacy? Actual lawyers will be quick to weigh in on this, and I hope they do. But it seems to me that in the late 80s, a panic consumed the then-bloggers of the New York Times about the state of stare decisis. Later, panic was shifted to the fate of what Alito famously called “super-duper precedent,” since treatment of precedent in the early age of the Rehnquist court-described (to further panic by then-Times bloggers!) by Rehnquist as “a principle of policy and not a mechanical formula of adherence to the latest decision”-had eroded, or, really, re-eroded, so far. Because what Justice Marshall called a “doctrine,” in his own panic over Rehnquist’s language, has never really been such. It was never, as liberals would sometimes have it (in otherwise good arguments), “the bedrock principle.” At least it certainly wasn’t in the Warren Court, or else we’d all be in our racially-segregated drug stores not able to buy condoms and unable to complain about such without fear of legal reprisal on our fancy blogs.

It is very easy for new British bands to get lost in the NME-led shuffle of Next Brilliant Things, which is a shame for acts like Blood Red Shoes, a biting male-female duo out of Brighton who are currently flogging their second full-length album, Fire Like This. (It’s not available in the States yet, annoyingly enough.) “Don’t Ask”, the record’s latest single, sounds like a post-postpunk tug of war between Steven Ansell and Laura-Mary Carter, who trade off vocal duties (his is petulant, hers is recorded in such a way that it sounds directly lifted from the Lush back catalog) over pounding drums and taut, wiry guitars. It’s pretty great listening for a rainy, chilly day like the one NYC is currently experiencing.

Your “awww” of the day comes from, of all places, Knifecrime Island: “A HORSE shot twice with a crossbow by callous yobs survived after four fellow steeds spent three hours taking turns — to LICK the wound clean. Mare Zeta came within a whisker of death after one of the bolts bounced off her rib while another lodged an inch from her lung. Evil louts blasted the 20-year-old — a competitor in show-jumping and dressage events across the UK — in the stomach as she grazed in a field. But four other competition horses in the same field ‘nursed’ Zeta by nuzzling her for three-and-a-half hours while taking turns to lick the wound.”

The “awww” obviously comes from the part about the horses protecting their friend, not the thing with the yobs and their shooty knife. Just wanted to make that clear. Man, Jonathan Swift had it right 300 years ago: Horses are better than British people.

Oh, look! A video about the virtues of abstinence education starring now-former Congressman Mark Souder and the staffer with whom he conducted a resignation-worthy affair, which lived on his YouTube channel until someone pointed out the obvious ironies of its existence to some poor intern. To be fair to Souder and his staffer Tracy Jackson, he is talking about promoting abstinence among kids. Perhaps his attitude is that once you’ve broken the seal, all bets are off? [Via]

American Museum of Natural History herpetologist Christopher J. Raxworthy has been writing a great blog at the Times for the past couple weeks documenting a field study of rare chameleon species in Madagascar. (It sounds like a really fun job, except for having to sleep in a tent and get bitten by malarial mosquitoes.) His most recent post contains an interesting aside about the differences between different types of zoologists.

“Herpetologists hate the dawn-it is the coldest part of the day, and very few species are active at this time. For this reason, most herpetologists are natural night owls, and are often considered slackers or party animals; the exact opposite of ornithologists who rise early, and are considered hard-working model citizens. On multidisciplined biological surveys, I would often be going to bed around the time the ornithologists were waking up, and by the time I woke up, would be scolded for missing breakfast and the dawn mixed feeding flocks. Of course, the remedy for this is to then pull out (from one of your collecting bags) an amazing herp (amphibian or reptile) from the previous night. ‘Yeah, well look what I got.’ But they still think you are a slacker.”

Here is a slice of a dispatch from today’s ESPN presentation in New York City that confused me: “Coca-Cola is looking at aiming its World Cup advertising not only at Hispanic consumers, Mr. Tripodi said, who traditionally follow the World Cup closely, but also African-Americans and the general market, particularly ‘soccer moms.’” Hold up — I understand the desire to expand marketing efforts, but I thought soccer moms were dubbed such because they spent a fair amount of time ferrying their children to activities like soccer, and not because they had a passion for the game? If the latter were true, certainly attendance at Major League Soccer events would be increasing at a faster clip than it currently is.

One more reason for me to worry about my continuing avoidance of the dentist: “new research shows that good oral care can prevent heart disease, diabetes and even dementia.” Sigh. Okay, give it to me, Science.

Scientists at the University of Kentucky in America put people aged between 75 and 90 through a test in which they were asked to recall 10 words they had been presented with five minutes earlier. All the participants, who repeated the test over three consecutive years, were from similar educational backgrounds, but there was variation in their results. People with fewer teeth scored lower than those with more teeth in the first test — and their scores declined far quicker thereafter.

I mean, okay, whatever, I’m already going to get heart disease from all the bacon, but Alzheimer’s? I guess I will have to start smoking and talking on my cell phone more frequently to counteract the whole thing. Because there’s no way you’re getting me into that chair, you SADISTS.

Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of A Fortunate Age, helps our host Emily Gould recreate the late 90s by cooking up the infamous harissa egg scramble once found at long-lost Williamsburg institution Oznot’s. (It is an exceptional hangover helper.) Cooking the Books-the Internet’s only cooking and book chat show!?-is directed by Valerie Temple and shot and edited by Andrew Gauthier. (PS Our in-house harissa recipe is here!)