Dorf on Law

Some years ago, I heard an interview with Anne Washburn, who wrote the book for Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, in which actors in a post-apocalyptic world retain few cultural artifacts of the pre-apocalyptic world but manage to reconstruct and perform an episode of The Simpsons. Over time, the play within the play evolves and moves further and further away from the original Simpsons episode. I didn't get to see  Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play , but I recall from the interview that Washburn said, perhaps reciting a line one of her character speaks in the play, something like this: The one good thing about living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape is you don't need to worry that there could be an apocalypse . It's a great and memorable line, but it isn't really true. Bad as things are, they can always get worse. Bears can invade the cave in which you're living. You can run out of salvaged fuel for your generators. Raiders from the neighboring valley can attack you. So

Yes, today is Election Day 2024, in the United States of America.  That means that one part of the campaign for political power is about to end, while a completely unprincipled campaign is about to begin, as Republicans go about installing Donald Trump in the White House in defiance of any vote counts.  There is a very small possibility that we will have a clear outcome in the next day or two, if it turns out that Trump seems to have won under the current rules.  But if Kamala Harris is deemed the winner -- and certainly if there are genuine doubts that require recounts and litigation -- the election will not be over potentially for a very long time, possibly extending beyond January 6 or even January 20, 2025.   It is worth noting that when Al Franken won his first (and, it turned out, only full) term as a US Senator from Minnesota in an election that ended on November 4, 2008, his razor-thin victory was not finalized until June 30, 2009, meaning that it took almost eight full months

An article in yesterday's NY Times , "In Shift From 2020, Identity Politics Loses its Grip on the Country,"  describes various ways in which the overall political zeitgeist has shifted since 2020. I don't quarrel with all of the specific vignettes the story relates, but I do want to suggest that it glosses over some important nuances. Let's start with attitudes towards policing. In the summer of 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd, mass protests brought attention to the Black Lives Matter movement and a number of inter-related policy proposals to shift away from carceral approaches to crime. The slogan "defund the police" meant different things to different people. No doubt many of the people using it did not literally mean that police should be abolished; rather, they were suggesting that many of the public resources given to the police should be diverted to other priorities that would lead to fewer deadly police/citizen interactions and m

Do you need a break from thinking and/or freaking out about the election? If so, you've come to the right place, at least today. Rather than writing about real or imagined election interference, I've chosen to devote my essay today to fan interference--as illustrated chiefly by two plays in the recently concluded World Series between the Dodgers and the Yankees. In Game 1, a Dodgers fan seated behind the wall in left-center field reached just over the wall to catch a ball hit by Yankees second baseman Gleyber Torres. The umpire immediately signaled fan interference based on a judgment that if the fan had not interfered, the ball would have hit the wall and stayed in play. Torres was awarded a double. Here's the play . For Yankees fans, that play brought to mind Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series, when 12-year-old fan Jeffrey Maier very clearly reached over the stands to catch a ball hit by Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, preventing it from being caught by