What are we to think of Websites that hide their religious mission behind home pages full of pop culture, sports, and mundane advice? To il...

We really should scrutinize John Edwards’ great success as a trial lawyer in medical malpractice cases , while the decision whether he wil...

Speaking of Google, I got all excited the other day when I discovered that this blog came up first when the word "Althouse" alone...

Since beginning this blog on January 14th, I have dropped a lot of names . Whatever names I dropped, I dropped because I was thinking about...

"And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank," by Steve Oney is reviewed by Marshall Frady i...

I see Prof. Yin is blogging last night's "The Apprentice." Ah, big surprise, the women win again by what the New York Times o...

Is this a picture of John Kerry or Donald Sutherland at the end of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" ? (Thanks, Chris.) Hey, isn...

The Dean-o-Phobe retires : ... Dean is finished as a potential nominee. He's blown all his money, his campaign is in disarray, and he...

Guy Coq has an op-ed in today’s NYT defending the proposed French law banning Muslim schoolgirls from wearing head scarves in class. He ci...

So Nina got Tonya and me to start blogging , and Tonya thinks she was blog-empted by my post about bad eBay spelling, and Nina's blogg...

Has there ever been a more beautiful movie poster than the one for "Big Fish" ?

Wow! Visual Thesaurus! Language will never be the same.

Janet Frame, 1924-2004, "spells history hiss-tree to make an unsettling connection to Eden's serpent." After a suicide attemp...

My car's thermometer reading this morning as I drove to work: - 8 degrees. Here's a new entry for my modern Dictionary of Received ...

The John Kerry and Botox issue. Wonkette quips : Our politicians owe it to us to be hot. We're the ones who have look at them all the t...

Here's a nice account of working for Jack Paar on The Tonight Show by Dick Cavett. Interesting revelation: Paar was very intelligent, ...

Did you ever just "Create a New Post" in Blogger, not meaning to hit the "Publish" button, then later, maybe the next d...

I love Jeremy Freese's cool, colorful pie charts depicting what he should be doing instead of blogging and what he actually would be do...

So we did finally get around to watching "American Idol" last night? I see Prof. Yin did a simulblog of the event, or at least o...

I can remember the elementary school teacher , one who pursued the “ whole language ” approach to learning to write, who scoffed at a child’...

Did you know that Jack Paar came up with the idea of the sofa and desk furniture arrangement for a TV talk show? Here are a few more things...

I'm itching to watch "American Idol" and the first episode of the new season of "The Osbournes," but the TV with t...

What's the deal with Technorati ? It purports to know when blogs are updated, and I see that if my blog address is put in right now, it...

Jack Paar has died. Look for obituaries attempting to explain that shrouded-in-the-mists-of-time W.C. incident: A man of boundless curiosi...

“I keep getting these phone calls from fans saying, ‘I’m sure he’s just gathering material.’ I wish that were true.” A New York Magazine c...

Three Martha Stewart things: 1. The Martha Stewart trial: sketchbook version . 2. Challenging Juror #1 , the dithering housewife, former c...

Here's an article in the NYT about the DVD for "Capturing the Friedmans" : We heard from theater managers that there was a pro...

Ah, a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Shohreh Aghdashloo ! Go Shohreh! Actually, I haven't seen the movies the other nominees in...

"[A]ll one needs to do is separate politics from law. Emotion from precedent." As Steve Martin would say, "First, get a milli...

Professor Yin linked to my Bush v. Gore post and--his blog takes comments (you have to email me)--fended off a critic. Hmm... is that a cri...

So how was Dennis Miller in his first effort? The "monkey," actually a chimpanzee, really was meant as a tribute to J. Fred Muggs,...

My first year Constitutional Law class will be dealing with Bush v. Gore today , specifically the Article II question the Rehnquist concurri...

The headline for the James Risen piece quoted in the previous post is: "Ex-Inspector Says C.I.A. Missed Disarray in Iraqi Arms Program...

The Dictator’s New Weapons. James Risen of the NYT reports on an interview with David A. Kay, the former C.I.A. chief weapons inspector: [...

Democracy in Iraq, the Kurdish view. Brwa Abdulrahman, 26, "nattily turned out in an ivory parka, leather pants and well-applied hair ...

Things to write in an obituary for a Hobo King : • "For every mile of beautiful scenery and warm sunshine, there are hundreds of miles...

Ah, friendship! Dennis Miller is giving Bush a free pass and Al Franken is giving Dennis Miller a free pass. The AP reports : Dennis Mille...

So can "a single bisexual woman who works for a university with excellent spousal benefits" marry her gay male roommate, who is he...

Bryan Keefer at the CJR Campaign Desk collects the evidence that reporters in the room with Howard Dean perceived his fateful scream speec...

Brilliant interplay between photography and painting by Eric Fischl. It's not enough to take a photograph. You have to elaborately sta...

How much of "The Apprentice" is a set up? Consider this description of the first three installments, described by the NYT : In th...

Oh, the horror of late-stage fame! Gennifer Flowers is starring in a musical revue called "Boobs." She has lips painted on her fi...

Nice forehead indentations, Neil! The NYT in a bid to pick up male readers for the Sunday Styles section.

If blogging is the way your mind looks on the web , then going back and rereading one’s miscellaneous back entries ought to give a person so...

Things to write in an obituary for a photographer : •His images were calculated to shock, often featuring tall, blond, sometimes naked women...

More about Captain Kangaroo , Bob Keeshan, from the NYT obituary . He started out in show business with the job of seating children in the a...

It's nice to see Ryan Lizza's new campaign journal in The New Republic. His take on Wesley Clark's campaign is particularly pi...

It was a bit "peculiar" of Al Sharpton to say he was "unilaterally opposed" to states' rights, as Robert Garcia Tag...

Investment schemes. Gawker writes : He got married and bought an apartment on the Lower East Side and THEN wrote a massive New York Times a...

Thinking about Spalding Gray.

2Blowhards write about rethinking reading habits (from A&L Daily ): • I'm always in the middle of a half dozen books. Often I finis...

Professor Yin thinks Dean (at the debate) looked like Tom Cruise in "Top Gun."

Timothy Noah watched Dean's Sawyer interview : Seeing Dean beg for mercy over what was merely an untelegenic display of enthusiasm calle...

Captain Kangaroo -- Bob Keeshan --has died. So long! Though, as a kangaroo, he was well suited to jumping, he never jumped the shark . I rem...

I watched the debate last night. I even TiVo'd it and a segment of commentary following it. But I did not watch Howard Dean and his wife...

Following Edwards's garbling of the Defense of Marriage Act, Al Sharpton took the first opportunity to push back: Well, let me say some...

The issue of gay marriage is taking an oversized role in thinking about who ought to be President. This is an issue that needs to ripen over...

Thanks to Iowa lawprof Tung Yin for linking to me! Nice to find another lawprof willing to opine about American Idol.

Writing about surrealism and coincidence makes me want to say something about my favorite movie, "My Dinner With Andre." Googling ...

Paul Auster's new book, by the way, is Oracle Night , and you can hear him discuss it (on Fresh Air).

Two of my favorite painters are Victor Brauner and Yves Tanguy . I had never heard of either until the first time I saw and was completel...

Go, Cliff! I could care less about golf. That would be if my nephew weren't on the PGA tour. So I will be frequently checking the live l...

Thanks to UCLA lawprof Stephen Bainbridge for linking to this site. I especially like being mentioned right below a post about Delaware, my...

So did I watch The Apprentice live, interlaced with TiVo'd American Idol during the commercials, in some sort of ultimate trash TV exper...

Gadgets you may not need . You can get a plasma TV screen for "$4,500 to $10,000," with "Ambilight, a series of cold-cathode ...

NYT obituary today : "George Woodbridge, a cartoonist and illustrator whose hapless, baggy suburbanites peopled Mad magazine for nearly...

So Gordon asks if I'm really going to Tivo American Idol, but the real question is what do you do on Wednesday when "The Apprentic...

Well, the "Tobacco and the Law" seminar is meeting down the hall in the George Young Room. They're watching a video with the b...