Posts From Author: Month: July 2014
Six Degrees of Reparation: John Paul Stevens Amends the US Constitution
Constitutional law has always been a game of semantics. So it’s a pleasure to discover that former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (Little, Brown, 2014), is so clear in expression and purpose. For many, in these ultra-partisan times, this slight yet impressive book may not tip any balances. But few could find much to criticise in Stevens’s clean, thorough, economical style. Reading Six Amendments is like being taken in hand by the best tour guide in the world as he rehearses arguments for and against, lays out the relevant legal history, and pulls clean the knot of his conclusions. At times his dexterity is almost moving. The book begins with a statement of confidence: confidence “that the soundness of each of my proposals will become more and more evident, and that ultimately each will be adopted.” This is the confidence of a man who recalls Prohibition, the Wall Street Crash, and the Second World War; who has seen now seventeen presidents; and whose ninety-four years make him well over a third of the age of the nation. His sureness will be reassuring to some. But what are his concerns […]
Read MoreFalling For Perfection
The curtain rose on a raucous final edition of the House of SpeakEasy’s inaugural “Seriously Entertaining” series last Monday at City Winery NYC. There were cartoons and Muppets, breast pumps and seaside sex scenes, moonlight and music and love and romance. Our guests — seven of them; our biggest line-up yet — made us swoon, made us cry, made us laugh, made us beg for one more glass of wine. First up to the plate was Bob Mankoff, the New Yorker‘s cartoon editor. “Many people have ideas for cartoons,” he told us. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants… They’ll all picture a desert island with two bears talking to a nun on rollerskates. Norman Mailer called in once, wanting to show his cartoons. ‘Well, they’re not exactly cartoons,’ he said. And he was right: they weren’t exactly cartoons. They were later published in the aptly titled Modest Gifts…” Of course it was not always thus. Mankoff, as he explains in his excellent memoir How About Never — Is Never Good For You?, submitted some two thousand cartoons to the New Yorker before he was published. The new generation, he revealed, struggle with the same levels of rejection that he had to deal with. “‘But it’ll make you a better […]
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