Yesterday Elena Kagan proved what I’ve been saying all along:  If you give them an education and a chance at the microphone, women are funnier than men.

Kagan getting the last laugh at the expense of South Carolina’s Republican Senator Lindsey Graham was a moment that will serve as a landmark for women’s humor for years to come.

When Graham, rather lackadaisically, intoned, “Christmas Day. Where were you on Christmas Day?,” I must admit that I held my breath. Kagan began what sounded like a long, round-about, and detailed response concerning the finer points of law. Sure, sure, she’s being examined precisely on those finer points of law, but I knew that the Senator would go back—like a hound-dog to a chew-toy— to his Christmas Day opening bit.

He did. Graham, keeping the wearied tone, interrupted Kagan and drawled, “I just asked where you were on Christmas.”

That’s when I fell in...

A friend has just called my attention to a short report in the most recent (July-August 2010) issue of Harvard Magazine entitled, "Bye-bye, Blue Books?" The hook for the piece is the fact that on May 11 the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences (FAS) formally abolished the long-standing procedure in which a final examination is scheduled for each FAS course unless the instructor notifies the Registrar that no examination will be required. 

Starting next fall, this traditional default (scheduling a final examination) will be replaced by a new default—that no examination will be scheduled for a course unless the instructor formally notifies the Registrar that a final will be required. This reverses an educational policy that is probably more than a century old. It is apparently the result of the realization that few current Harvard courses in fact require their students to "sit" for...

For the past couple of years, I’ve eagerly started off all my Wednesdays by reading Olivia Judson’s science blog at The New York Times. This morning, she informed readers that she’s going on sabbatical for a year. No one can begrudge her this breather. She’s been blogging about biology more or less relentlessly for the past two years, with only one break that I can remember (in her absence, she invited wonderful guests to blog for her as substitutes). Still, for admirers like me, this is a sad day.

Judson, an evolutionary biologist, is not merely a blogger. She is a research fellow in biology at Imperial College, London, and the author of the knowledgeable, award-winning and extremely comic, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex. She uses her blog to write lovingly and informatively about an enormous range of topics in biology—...

I had the stomach flu yesterday, which gave me the opportunity to watch a full day of Solicitor General Kagan’s confirmation hearings. She is a mighty impressive witness, composed at all times, with deep scholarly knowledge of the law, and a bit of wit that makes her not only very likable, but also seemingly very human.   Whether or not one likes her positions on the full range of issues, or whether you believe she will be activist or originalist in her interpretation of the Constitution, there is no doubt that she has what it takes to do the very important and difficult job for which she has been nominated. 

To be sure, the nominees put forward by the president of one party are always going to be challenged by Members of Congress in the other, and each president will nominate a person whose decisions are based on the law, but whose interpretations of the law will obviously be biased in...

Holy cow. A Russian spy ring busted by the FBI—a “sleeper network” planted 20 years ago, consisting of 11 undercover agents posing as regular Americans, suddenly outed.  There they were, the whole time—regular Americans with marriages and kids, and with names like “Cynthia” and “Richard." Living in the suburbs, they were holding down good jobs, buying homes, and tending to their gardens. These arrests come as a real jolt. Now that the Cold War is a thing of the past, we aren’t used to Russian spy rings. Even the words sound old-fashioned. The story also evokes spy novels, of course—John Le Carré, or Tom Clancy, or with Anna Chapman, one of the alleged spies, Ian Fleming. Chapman looks like a pretty hot item—the kind of woman who’s seen some serious cuddling with James Bond.

My husband, who’s read every spy novel ever written, appears oddly uninterested in these latest real-world spies. ...

It was good timing, having Senate hearings on Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court begin on the same day as the Court's 5-4 ruling that the University of California's Hastings College of Law acted reasonably in refusing to recognize a Christian group that denies membership to homosexual students. The Senate hearings are premised on the idea that Court nominees should be chosen and interrogated based entirely on their "judicial philosophy" and ideas about the law. So nominees dutifully say things about modesty and justices as umpires and so forth, even as we all understand that the Hastings decision had nothing to with the law and everything to do with the justices' personal convictions about homosexuality.

Some people believe that sexual orientation is a fundamental element of personhood. From there, it logically follows that a college's obligations to nondiscrimination...

My mother died in 1953 and my father’s second wife was a German woman whose family was deeply committed to anthroposophy, the world system that had been devised and promoted by the Austrian-born seer and philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Our family was Quaker, my parents had joined the Society of Friends just after the Second World War, and by the time my step mother came along I was away at a Quaker boarding school, then university, and off to Canada in 1962.  Thus I never really got much exposure to anthroposophy; but in the 1960s my father gave up his job as a bursar at a Friends’ school and went to become bursar at a large Steiner School, or as they are known, Waldorf School, where he remained until he retired (and died shortly thereafter) in the early 1990s. 

I should say that in the 1980s, then a single parent, when I went on sabbatical in England my kids lived with my father and step...

The New York Times reprinted a political cartoon last Sunday which got the financial reform bill (the bill is out of conference committee and about to be voted on by the full Senate and House) just right.

The cartoon: a little mouse, in a suit, carries a brief case labeled "bank reform" between two phalanxes of tall cats dressed up as bank lobbyists and asks himself, "define final passage." The cartoon identifies where the tooth and claw of the reform is going to lie—in the myriad of regulations and rules that will determine how much banks will have to pay for the financial reform and how much of their most profitable and risky business activity will be clipped.

USA Today estimates that agencies will have to pass 350 rules compared to Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, which required only 16 rules. (Yesterday’s USA Today has a nice summary of the bill by reporters Davidson, Wiseman, and Waggoner ...

I have my playlist going during dinner—my husband is away and my friend Karen is over for really fancy mac & cheese (I make it with gruyere, gorgonzola, fresh horseradish, chopped red onion, and Madeira)—and Karen wonders, in passing the salad dressing, why there are all these great songs about high school and none about college.

Why there were no good songs about college had not been a question keeping me up at night. It had not occurred to me before always-interesting Karen asked the question. Once she asked it, though, the rest of the night was shot.

Not that it wasn’t a fun evening—it was a riot. We always have an excellent time. It was simply that, throughout the organic spinach salad with fresh bacon and apple course, all we could do was look for lyrics. We dragged the laptop to the dinner table, pushed away the lovely candles and nice linens while keeping the good glasses...

Well, now my fellow bloggers have gone too far.  It is one thing to slag me off for being old. People like me and Senator John McCain are used to it and take it as part of the cost of still staying involved in the real world. But when people start saying rude things about Rear Window, then that is simply too much. I have spoken before of my love of American movies, especially those from the 1950s. Shane is still my all time favorite, but Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window comes a very close second—very close.

First—warning, plot spoiler—the story itself is simple but gripping and unfolds with perfect timing. A professional photographer (for magazines), L. B. Jeffries (“Jeff”), has had one of his legs smashed up when he was on assignment. He is confined to a chair in his apartment, in Greenwich Village, looking out onto an enclosed courtyard, where he can and does spy (or if you ...