Dahlia Lithwick writes that Merrick Garland, currently being snubbed by the GOP, is a cautious, restrained judge, whose centrist opinions are a matter of record. He’s “not a fount of quotable sound bites” but “a guy who gets up every morning and does a little law.” And Michael Gerhardt argues that Garland is eminently deserving of the nod: “It is hard to imagine a better qualified nominee to the Supreme Court. … Whatever else one thinks of this nomination, his merit cannot be denied.”
Hold on, writes Eric Posner. Republicans have solid ideological reasons to want to block Garland, in particular, from the court. “Whether Garland votes as a liberal or a moderate liberal, this means the court will shift radically from the right to the left,” Posner argues. “While Garland’s supporters say that he’s too much of a ‘judge’s judge’ to reverse course and vote with the other liberals … there is little reason for Republicans to believe this.”
Jake Blumgart’s interview with sociologist Matthew Desmond, the author of a new book on eviction, is painful and eye-opening to read. Because of rising rents and utilities costs, “this phenomenon has become devastatingly common, wracking whole neighborhoods and destabilizing poor, and usually black, communities,” Blumgart writes. Asked about eviction’s social effects, Desmond said:
The consequences … are so much greater than I was fully aware of when I started the work. Families not only lose their homes. Kids lose their schools. They also lose their things, which are piled on the sidewalk. It’s a lot of time and money to establish a home, and eviction erases all that. It comes with a record, which affects your chances of moving into stable housing because a lot of landlords will turn you away. Even in public housing an eviction record is counted as a strike.
Yale’s basketball team is going to the NCAA tournament for the first time in 54 years, but because the team’s captain Jack Montague has been charged with sexual misconduct and is absent from the lineup, the event has polarized the campus. Katy Waldman writes that the reaction to the team’s success this year reveals “a stubborn, still-painful divide between ‘sports Yale’ and ‘non-sports Yale.’ ”
The exorcism thriller Dark Debts, by Karen Hall, is 20 years old, and Hall was recently given the chance to revise and republish her book. Laura Miller assesses the results of this interesting experiment, and finds that “the story of [Dark Debts’] transformation exposes paradoxes at the intersection of faith, progress, and popular culture.”
For fun: This interactive map, made by Dutch researchers, uses an algorithm to pull data from Wikipedia to plot locations of battles in global history. Not perfect, but fascinating.
We’re one contentious species,
Rebecca
