Link Banana

Steven Pinker has a brief and enjoyable essay, arguing essentially that, in the most recent Atlantic. The most interesting bit (profanity ahead!):

This progression explains why many speakers are unaware that sucker, sucks, bites, and blows originally referred to fellatio, or that a jerk was a masturbator. It explains why Close the fucking door, What the fuck?, Holy Fuck!, and Fuck you! violate all rules of English syntax and semantics—they presumably replaced Close the damned door, What in Hell?, Holy Mary!, and Damn you! when religious profanity lost its zing and new words had to be recruited to wake listeners up.

Bruce Ackerman and Jennifer Nou offer the most interesting argument I’ve seen regarding the Supreme Court’s recent voter ID ruling:

Indiana’s law insists on a photo ID to vote, which in turn requires documents, like a birth certificate or passport, that verify identity. Getting these papers costs voters money as well as time and effort. This leads to the question the court failed to ask: Does the extra expense violate the absolute ban on all “taxes” imposed by the 24^th Amendment?

I was leery of Jeffrey Rosen’s piece about the Supreme Court, expecting a traditional “the court’s too conservative” screeds, and found something much more intriguing. (Though I concede it could still be reduced to “the court’s too conservative”)

Though the current Supreme Court has a well-earned reputation for divisiveness, it has been surprisingly united in cases affecting business interests. Of the 30 business cases last term, 22 were decided unanimously, or with only one or two dissenting votes.

… There are no economic populists on the court, even on the liberal wing. And ever since John Roberts was appointed chief justice in 2005, the court has seemed only more receptive to business concerns. Forty percent of the cases the court heard last term involved business interests, up from around 30 percent in recent years. While the Rehnquist Court heard less than one antitrust decision a year, on average, between 1988 and 2003, the Roberts Court has heard seven in its first two terms — and all of them were decided in favor of the corporate defendants.

Slate’s Dahlia Litwick’s not shy about wearing her convictions on her sleeve in her critical summary of the day’s arguments in Indiana’s voter identification case before the Supreme Court.

To recap: I fear I am counting five justices who believe that a nonexistent problem can be constitutionally cured by burdening the fundamental right to vote. Happy byproduct? Doing away with those pesky facial challenges that liberals like to use to address massive injustices. So in the guise of doing away with hypothetical future challenges to a law, the court is poised to uphold a law that solves hypothetical future problems in voting. And for those of you wondering why the court didn’t see fit to release audio for today’s monumentally important argument, the answer remains, who knows? But here’s one guess: The justices didn’t want to be caught on tape sounding like the same 5-4 court that decided Bush v. Gore, even if nothing has changed.