Audible Althouse #47.

I'm feeling at cross-purposes with the other lawprofs at the lawproffy "Bloggership" conference at Harvard, and I'm thinki...

Catching up on the NYT/taking a hot bath.

I want to read the three newspapers that came while I was away, but I don't want to spend all evening on the task. I've got a podcas...

Home! Home! Madison! Home!

That's how I feel about home! Composed en route from Boston: Why, oh, why does it cost $7.95 to access the WiFi in an airport? What good...

Decompressing in Boston.

I spent yesterday wandering around Boston, going visual after the long day of words that was Friday . Any conference is a mix of tension and...

Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Did you watch Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner? I love Colbert, but it was a little scary watchin...

Garden shadows.

In the Boston Public Garden today, the brilliant sun made lusciously dark shadows:

God bless the man...

... who chaperoned a gaggle of teenagers in Boston's Public Garden today and wore an utterly self-abnegating sweater, so that the kids w...

All the bad things you thought you might one day read had happened to Keith Richards...

Was falling out of a tree even on the list?

"The Star-Spangled Banner"/"Nuestro Himno."

Is it wrong to sing the national anthem in Spanish? (Listen to it here .) When President Bush says "I think people who want to be a ci...

In France, in a city I've never heard of, looking for an internet connection.

Nina's off on her long European trip, and the first stop is Apremont , because when you think of trekking to Europe, you think of Aprem...

Photography in buildings.

Kristian Knutsen writes about the difficult distinctions between bloggers and traditional press when it comes to taking photographs inside ...

Live-blogging the Bloggership conference!

I'm here, in the nerdy front row, and I'll be live-blogging all day. Here 's the link if you want to listen. No video, so you...

"On some level he means what he's saying, and is making fun of himself for meaning it..."

Amba on religion and "The Colbert Report": Colbert is something far more subtle than a fundamentalist, but on some level he means...

So Alec Baldwin punched the wall because of the air conditioning.

Here 's a puzzling story about an actress, Jan Maxwell, quitting her role in a NY play, because she can't stand Alec Baldwin, her co...

At the Bloggership conference.

Well, here I am at the Cambridge Hyatt, where, from your room, you hear some guy playing schmaltzy music on a grand piano that is located so...

"I know that you will be able to read this from Heaven."

What will happen to your web space after you die ? Will the commenters swoop in and talk about you, talk to you? Will new readers flow in, ...

Extremely fussy bedding.

Here 's an article about how women are layering their beds with all sorts of fancy pillows and "bed scarves" and other paraphe...

"American Idol" -- the results.

ADDED: If you're looking for the results of the latest show, click on the banner -- "Althouse" -- at the top of the page and s...

"The Painful Realities of Hyena Sex."

See what I found for you? An article about the painful realities of hyena sex : [I]n the final stages of pregnancy, high-ranking females pro...

"A strange combination of religion, karaoke, and pride."

Why Birmingham, Alabama is at the core of "American Idol."

The sleek new press secretary.

So what do you think of Tony Snow as the new White House press secretary ? He's got a nice polished look and demeanor. That's got to...

"They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals."

"They" being apes . (Via Memeorandum .)

"He's just a smart, funny guy."

That would be Mick Jagger, who went for an offer of a secondary role in a TV pilot. "He did a lot of ad-libbing. Some of the funniest ...

Surveying the readers of political blogs.

BlogAds surveyed readers of political blogs. Here are the composite results, and here are the results for Althouse. Does anything surprise...

"I'm the decider, and I decide what's best."

That Bush quote has gotten a lot of attention, including this front-page NYT article . It's not about Bush, though, and then it's no...

"American Idol" -- the final 6.

ADDED: If you're looking for the results of the latest show, click on the banner -- "Althouse" -- at the top of the page and s...

"She bulldozes out of existence every desirable innovation in urban planning during the last century..."

Ah, to write a truly great, truly influential book! Goodbye to Jane Jacobs. "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

Meet the bloggers.

There's that big "Bloggership" conference at Harvard Law School this Friday. Not only can you attend this conference -- it...

A "dominant face" and a "submissive face."

Composite images: Actually, I'm offended by the whole notion. It reminds me of an exhibit of Nazi propoganda I saw at the Anne Frank Hou...

"McKinney ... kept restating her charges of discrimination and profiling - which is just how a good bluff works."

Lawprof Steven Lubet -- who's got a new book, "Lawyers' Poker: 52 Lessons That Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players" -- is...

"Propped against a padded backboard, held in place with a harness."

Now, you can be even more squashed on a plane. Here 's the crazy new standing section.

"I think I belong in the women's section of the jail, but I don't foresee that happening."

Where would you put pre-operative transgendered inmates ? IN THE COMMENTS: A lot of folks are focusing on this: "She legally changed he...

"I've thought about starting to pretend to be more politically conservative than I am in seminars just to feel less complicit in all this."

Suffering through sociology , where "[y]ou are asked to believe that the way to 'de-racialize' something is to take an award wi...

"There will be blood on the walls. There will be #&!*ing blood everywhere."

Allie does not want to lose on tonight's "Apprentice." She gets over-the-top fierce planning how she's going to destroy An...

"I don't want that grand, visionary, transporting movie experience made for the big screen to become a thing of the past."

That's a general idea -- expressed by James Cameron -- that I can embrace whole-heartedly. But the specific idea is frightful: 3-D . I...

Blogger is annoying me...

It just can't seem to push the posts through. This is just a post designed to ram the preceding posts through, not that I think it'l...

"An action can be collectively willed but enacted by small groups."

Says Paul Greengrass, director of the film "United 93," who had to find a way to tell the story and not offend the families of th...

"It ran sideways, like a crab, and all that."

Virginia Heffernan loves the Ricky Gervais podcast, but she struggles to convey why Karl Pilkington is so funny. Finally, she sort of gives...

"We are not all the Nokia-wielding people the government would like you to think we are."

A national identity crisis: "Finns nearly choked on their cereal when they realized we were the face Finland would be showing to the wo...

"The Sopranos," "Big Love."

Did you watch? I thought both shows were relatively uninteresting tonight. Maybe it's just me. I'm always happy to watch Christopher...

Audible Althouse #46.

Here . What I hate about movies, who's beautiful and who isn't, feeling transformed by architecture, what makes a good song lyric, w...

200 photographs.

I was just thinking that my text-to-photograph ratio had shifted way too far toward the photographic -- a consequence of springtime? -- and ...

"We are being played by the lawyers, with leaks and well-chosen sound bites."

Do you think you know which side is telling the truth in the Duke lacrosse team rape case? You shouldn't. IN THE COMMENTS: I defend Dahl...

Suddenly, something is keeping us alive.

Did you notice the stunning drop in the death rate? The National Center for Health Statistics reports that there was a 2 percent decrease i...

"The yield of her legendary scrutiny informed by a worldliness more political than clitoral."

Do you trust a writer who writes like that to tell you why one writer is better than another? Her spare precise locution rewards not specta...

Art bikes.

Tulips and politics.

Today, in the public square, it's all tulips and politics. Closeup on the politics: Respite:

"It creates a habit of fluency that pours right over the surliest block."

The surliest writer's block , that is. So says Amba , talking about blogging, in response to -- thanks! -- my little "pseudo-blog...

The naked carpenter.

Percy Honniball. (Love the name!) He told officers he stripped before crawling under the client's house to do electrical work because h...

What I hate about movies.

I've been avoiding going to the movie theater for a while. After years of weekly attendance, I've cut down to perhaps five times a y...

"A remarkably beautiful woman who was surprisingly shy, yet spoke her mind fearlessly... who thought little of herself as an actress..."

Peter Bogdonovich on Ava Gardner. I must confess that I've never understood why people -- is it just men? -- are enthralled by Ava Gardn...

Photos from the set.

Rick Lee has photos from the set of the movie "We... Are Marshall." The movie is set in 1970s, so the costumes are horrifying, es...

An evening walk.

It's nice to make it to the end of what was a grueling week here in Madison, Wisconsin, but let's step outside for a little walk. Th...

"Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned/Homosexuality is Shameful."

Those are words on the front and back of a T-shirt, worn to school by a student reacting to the school's Gay-Straight Alliance events. A...

"Bullet and teardrop shapes and parallel 'speed lines'..."

Streamlining -- "the paring down of shape until it presents the least possible resistance to the flow of air or water" -- is a mo...

Getting some words written.

Today was the deadline for the papers for next week's "Bloggership" conference. Here's a list of the words in my essay le...

The hill warms up.

At dawn, Bascom Hill is austere: Later, warm springtime firms up its grip on us, and some feel it more than others: Ah, the boyfriend -- as ...

"Theme Time Radio Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan."

I'm glad Bob Dylan's XM Radio show is finally going to debut (on May 3rd), but what's with the title ? Well, he is going to hav...

The 100 unsexiest men in the world.

Surely, there's someone less sexy than Gilbert Gottfried, but when you're making a list , you've got to put famous people on it...

"She makes her entrance in the first act and freezes with the unyielding stiffness of an industrial lamppost...."

Julia Roberts is in a Broadway play. Ms. Roberts often gives the impression that she is parsing her lines, leaving lots of dead air between ...

"A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus."

Chernobyl as paradise , for animals. As humans were evacuated from the area 20 years ago, animals moved in. Existing populations multiplied ...

"American Idol" -- the results.

NOTE: To read about the most recent "Amercian Idol" results show, click on the "Althouse" banner above and scroll down t...

"The hookah is 3,500 years old, it's part of culture, it's part of religion, and everyone loves it."

Here 's a NYT article on the college tobacco hookah-smoking trend. And here's the part about UW: Near the University of Wisconsin...

"I don't want a 'competent' lawyer. I want a lawyer to get me off. I want a lawyer to invent the Twinkie defense. I want to win."

Said Justice Scalia yesterday, in a case about whether a criminal defendant has an absolute right to the lawyer of his choice. The governme...

"American Idol" -- the final 7 sing old standards.

Rod Stewart is here tonight to lead the kids into "the great American songbook." "I've always loved these songs. I was br...

"I thought that would be good. Very nutritious."

Said Tom Cruise, about his baby's placenta. (Is the placenta the baby's or the mother's? And which way troubles you more?) It s...

"American Idol" is really "Southern Idol"... but why?

Some analysis from WaPo writer Neely Tucker. It's not that southerners watch the show more and vote more and vote for their own, Tucker...

Writing about blogging and blogging about writing about blogging...

I see from this Prawfsblog post by Paul Horwitz that Orin Kerr has posted his paper for the Harvard Bloggership conference . The conference...

I'm glad to see that Robin Givhan won a Pulitzer Prize.

Here 's the report in her newspaper, The Washington Post. The category is Criticism. Criticize all you want, but she's my favorite b...