In the two years we have lived in Princeton, New Jersey I have found only one barber whose work meets with the approval of my wife Amy. And he is a one-hour drive away. Don’t ask. It’s a small price to pay for marital bliss. At least on the subject of my hair.
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I did not rush to write after the second debate of this presidential election season, the first between vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump. I, along with the majority of the debate watchers, was not going to change my voting plans as a result of the ninety-minute session. I tuned in for the spectacle. And, it appears, I had a lot of company. The debate drew an impressive audience of 67.1 million viewers. This was a big increase from the 51.3 million viewers for the first debate, the one between President Joe Biden and Trump.
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Boeing’s Starliner capsule is seen docked to the International Space Station in this zoomed-in view of an image captured by Maxar Technologies’ WorldView-3 satellite on June 7, 2024. (Image credit: Maxar Technologies via NASA)
The Starliner capsule returned to Earth safely from the International Space Station last night, without the two astronauts it took up there in June. Boeing and NASA engineers will review the vehicle’s performance on reentry as they consider the future of the program.
Two astronauts who flew to the International Space Station on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft will return to Earth next year on a SpaceX “Crew Dragon” vehicle, their planned eight-day test flight turned into a two-thirds of a year ordeal. It is yet another of a long list of failures by the once venerated aerospace company in recent years.
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The 2024 Democratic National Convention is about to begin in my hometown. I am worried.
In the summer of 1968, I was between my junior and senior years in high school. After a string of the usual summer jobs, delivering clothes for the local tailor, bagging groceries at the local supermarket, this summer I had a “real” job. I was writing computer programs for the City of Chicago. It was a big secret in those days that if you ignored a parking ticket in Chicago, you would never hear from the city. That was because the city’s traffic court, which had a crew of one hundred patronage workers dutifully typing the data from each ticket and each mailed in payment onto computer punched cards, no one had written the programs to match the two card decks and print out notices threatening arrest to the scofflaws who hadn’t paid.
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The consensus view holds that the candidates for vice president have little impact on voter’s choices in a presidential election. I have no evidence to refute this. But I do have a kind of gut feeling that the people slated to fill the number two position on the ticket may have more influence than usual this time around.
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In my two previous columns (here and here) I detailed some of the winners and losers resulting from the opinions issued during the Supreme Court term just ended. Now let us look at the biggest winner of them all, the Supreme Court itself. In the last three weeks of the term, the Supreme Court transferred much of regulatory and administrative authority and rulemaking to itself. The federal courts were not authorized and are not equipped to serve as roving regulators of last resort for hundreds of federal agencies. According to the Court:
Every summer professors at the nation’s law schools huddle to discuss what, if any, changes should be made to their teaching curriculum after the Supreme Court term just ended. This year, they are scrambling to deal with the train wreck for constitutional law that was the Court’s 2023-2024 term.
I am not a lawyer. But after fifty years as a journalist, I am spending my emeritus years in part teaching a course titled “Media Law and Ethics for Journalists” in the UCLA Extension program. This is a required course in the school’s journalism certificate program and is available online.
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