Richard A. Posner

Judith Butler and Ed Whelan have probably never met. And if they did, we may be quite certain that they would have very little use for one another. After all, what does the professor of comparative literature, author of (among other works) Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly who teaches in the Critical Theory Program at Berkeley, have to do with the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the co-editor of Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith and a Life Well Lived? And yet, they find themselves embarrassed by nearly identical behaviors, forced to make shamefaced admissions that they have behaved like nasty, irresponsible idiots.

Butler wrote a letter, signed by 50 other professors, urging New York University’s president and provost not to implement disciplinary sanctions on Avital Ronell, a professor of German, comparative literature, and English, for sexual harassment of a graduate student whom Butler described as having “waged a malicious campaign against [Ronell]” with “malicious intention.” (Style point: It’s bad for anyone, including literature professors, to repeat the same strong adjective in one paragraph). Ronell, who also holds the Jacques Derrida Chair of Philosophy at the European Graduate School is, needless to say, a very important person in the world of critical theory.

On Friday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted that he has “no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents.”

Let me tell you what life was like as a girl in Montgomery County, Maryland, in the early 1980s. I am a year older than Christine Blasey Ford and a year younger than Brett Kavanaugh. I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, a few miles from both Holton Arms, Ford’s school, and Georgetown Prep, which Kavanaugh attended, but I went to my local public high school, Churchill. Never mind that any girl who was in high school in Potomac during that era knew, through the whisper network, not to go to a Georgetown Prep party alone. That was a given. What was also a given is that “date rape,” as a term, was in its infancy. Most of us thought getting our bodies groped at a high-school party—or anywhere—was the unfortunate price we paid for having them, not something we would ever go to the police to report.

For nearly six months, one of the world’s top economies has been gripped by crisis, sparking fears of wider financial contagion. Since the spring, the Turkish currency has cratered while inflation has soared, rattling other emerging markets from Argentina and Indonesia. Yet the most important warning to draw from Turkey’s recent convulsions is less economic than political: namely, the danger of betting on strongman rule.

In truth, worries about Turkey melting down the global economy are misplaced. Unlike during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, when the collapse of the Thai currency unleashed regional upheaval, Turkey’s problems are less an indicator of systemic weakness across developing economies than the outgrowth of factors that are specific to Ankara. These include a politicized monetary policy, the highest current account deficit among the G-20 developing economies, the most foreign-denominated private sector debt of any emerging market, and a gratuitous fight with Washington that has escalated into sanctions.

On December 31, 1999, we threw a party. It was the end of one millennium and the start of a new one; people very much wanted to celebrate, preferably somewhere exotic. Our party fulfilled that criterion. We held it at Chobielin, the manor house in northwest Poland that my husband and his parents had purchased a decade earlier, when it was a mildewed ruin. We had restored the house, very slowly. It was not exactly finished in 1999, but it did have a new roof. It also had a large, freshly painted, and completely unfurnished salon—perfect for a party.

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The guests were various: journalist friends from London and Berlin, a few diplomats based in Warsaw, two friends who flew in from New York. But most of them were Poles, friends of ours and colleagues of my husband, who was then a deputy foreign minister in the Polish government. A handful of youngish Polish journalists came too—none then particularly famous—along with a few civil servants and one or two members of the government.

Donald Rose has no teeth, but that’s not his biggest problem. A camouflage hat droops over his ancient, wire-framed glasses. He’s only 43, but he looks much older.

I met him one day in October as he sat on a tan metal folding chair in the hallway of Riverview School, one of the few schools—few buildings, really—in the coal-mining town of Grundy, Virginia. That day it was the site of a free clinic, the Remote Area Medical. Rose was there to get new glasses—he’s on Medicare, which doesn’t cover most vision services.

Remote Area Medical was founded in 1985 by Stan Brock, a 79-year-old Brit who wears a tan Air-Force-style uniform and formerly hosted a nature TV show called Wild Kingdom. Even after he spent time in the wilds of Guyana, Brock came to the conclusion that poor Americans needed access to medical care about as badly as the Guyanese did. Now Remote Area Medical holds 20 or so packed clinics all over the country each year, providing free checkups and services to low-income families who pour in from around the region.

In a likely redux of the 1991 Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings, Washington appears headed for dramatic public testimony by the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the woman who’s accused him of sexual assault when they were teens, the research psychologist Christine Blasey Ford. After negotiations over the weekend with Ford’s lawyers, Judiciary Committee Republicans announced on Sunday afternoon that a hearing was set for 10 a.m. Thursday.

But what should that hearing look like? How can senators determine what happened at a high-school house party in the 1980s? How should they treat a private citizen who has come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against a man up for a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court? How should they treat the nominee who categorically denies assaulting anyone, ever? What should be the standard of proof?

The change can be baffling to many parents: Their young girls are masters of the universe, full of gutsy fire. But as puberty sets in, their confidence nose-dives, and those same daughters can transform into unrecognizably timid, cautious, risk-averse versions of their former self.

Over the course of writing our latest book, we spoke with hundreds of tween and teen girls who detailed a striking number of things they don’t feel confident about: “making new friends,” “the way I dress,” “speaking in a group.” In our research, we worked with Ypulse, a polling firm that focuses on tweens and teens, to survey more than 1,300 girls from the ages of 8 to 18 and their parents. (The sample was broadly representative of the country’s teen population in terms of race and geographic distribution.) The data is more dramatic than we’d imagined: The girls surveyed were asked to rate their confidence on a scale of 0 to 10, and from the ages of 8 to 14, the average of girls’ responses fell from approximately 8.5 to 6—a drop-off of 30 percent.

James Madison traveled to Philadelphia in 1787 with Athens on his mind. He had spent the year before the Constitutional Convention reading two trunkfuls of books on the history of failed democracies, sent to him from Paris by Thomas Jefferson. Madison was determined, in drafting the Constitution, to avoid the fate of those “ancient and modern confederacies,” which he believed had succumbed to rule by demagogues and mobs.

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Madison’s reading convinced him that direct democracies—such as the assembly in Athens, where 6,000 citizens were required for a quorum—unleashed populist passions that overcame the cool, deliberative reason prized above all by Enlightenment thinkers. “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason,” he argued in The Federalist Papers, the essays he wrote (along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) to build support for the ratification of the Constitution. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

When Delphine Thizy talks to people about eliminating malaria by targeting mosquitos, the one question she says everyone asks—“whether you’re talking to someone in a village in Africa who has never studied biology or an ecologist or a UN ambassador”—is this: What are the consequences?

It’s a good question. To humans, mosquitoes are at best annoying and at worst deadly, but to dozens of other species in the wild, they are competitor, pollinator, or prey. If past malaria-eradication campaigns have taught us anything (see: 1950s, DDT), it is that reshaping the environment can have unintended consequences.

Thizy talks about mosquitos because she is the stakeholder engagement manager for Target Malaria, a Bill Gates–backed nonprofit research consortium developing genetically modified mosquitoes to suppress populations of the bugs that spread the disease. The technology is ambitious and new, and thus controversial. Even though its genetically modified mosquitoes likely won’t be ready until 2029, Target Malaria has gotten enough questions about ecological consequences that it realized answering with the current scientific consensus—It will probably be fine!—was not good enough.

Dear Therapist,

One of my best friends—I've known him since I was fourteen—is a bit of an inadvertent asshole. He can sometimes come off as incredibly insensitive, rude, show-offy, and, for some reason, he competes with me in life. I am aware of these qualities, but I attribute them to his very difficult past and upbringing. I believe these experiences have given him a complex and some rough edges—hence my calling him an “inadvertent asshole.” To put it another way: I have known people who are nice, polite, and thoughtful, but who have not been there when I truly needed them. This friend, on the other hand, can come off as a prick, but if you call him at 2 o’clock in the morning for literally anything, he’ll be there, no hesitation. He’s always been there for me, and I love him like a brother.