Jack

Castle Rock. Available July 25 from Hulu.

They say you can't go home again. If you were from Castle Rock, why would you want to?

For about four decades now, Stephen King has been peopling this (fictional) little Maine town with vengeful witches, homicidally rabid dogs, political assassins, Satanic shopkeepers, telepathic ghost magnets, Polaroid portals to hellish alternative universes, and mutant rats the size of cows. It's not quite the most accursed of the western Maine hamlets where King sets his works—that would surely be 'Salem's Lot, so thoroughly overrun by vampires that the handful of survivors burned it to the ground in the mid-1970s—but with 30 or so appearances in his novels and short stories, Castle Rock is clearly the most persistently malevolent locale in Kinglandia.

Hulu's new series Castle Rock is clearly an attempt to answer a question that has occurred to nearly every King reader multiple times over the years: Do the folks in this town ever notice the unholy frequency with which their neighbors fall into quicksand pits, get ravaged by their house pets, or are driven insane by mundane household items purchased at pawn shops?

Oh, yes they do, and you'll have a creepy good time as Castle Rock follows their efforts to figure out why their town is such a demonic piece of crap. One of the lead investigators is even a Realtor, who I imagine faces some serious professional challenges in a town like this. ("It's very cute little Cape Cod at an owner-was-murdered-by-a-jealous-neighbor-for-having-sex-with-the-ghost-of-Elvis price!")

More important, though, is Dale Lacy, the warden of Castle Rock's privately-administered Shawshank prison (yes, that Shawshank), who (spoiler alert, and while we're at it, upchuck alert) commits grisly suicide in the show's opening moments.

His successor wonders why Lacy kept an entire cell block closed when the inmates in the rest of the prison are confined two to a tiny cell. After a bit of exploration, the answer is painfully apparent and probably explains the warden's surprising suicide: He kept a young man, half-naked, locked in a cage in the cell block basement.

Though the prison tries to keep the discovery secret—bad for the stockholders, you know—word leaks out and brings defense attorney Henry Deaver (Andre Holland, The Knick) back to town.

Though Deaver grew up in Castle Rock, he's the ultimate outsider: The adopted black son of white parents, he exiled himself as an adult because nearly everybody in town believes that, as a child, he murdered his own father during a winter hike in the woods. The dad's pulverized body was found at the foot of a cliff, while Henry wandered back 11 days later, mysteriously undamaged by 11 days outside in sub-zero weather—except for a convenient memory blackout.

King is credited as an executive producer on Castle Rock, though he apparently didn't do any of the actual writing. (The screenplays are credited to Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason, who worked together on Manhattan, an intriguing and underwatched WGN America series about life on the dusty New Mexico base where the atomic bomb was being developed.) But his style is stamped everywhere on the show: the deceptive nature of evil (Is the young man caged under the prison really a victim? Is Deaver really a bad-seed patricide?); the Our Town-style story-telling, in which white picket fences conceal—and sometimes confine—moral decay and predation inside; the seductive web of subplots that might converge and might simply die out the way little dramas in real life often do.

Castle Rock, especially in the early going, unfurls its tentacles slowly, but their grip is eerily strong; over the three episodes I watched, I was never tempted to look away.

You don't need to know a damn thing about King or his work to enjoy the macabre machinations of Castle Rock. But if you do, watching is like a bunnyfest in July, with Easter eggs scattered everywhere as characters from and allusions to his novels, short stories, and adaptations pop up in nearly every scene. If an old newspaper clipping falls out of a file folder, you know it will be a story about a family chewed upon by a pet dog or a kid hit by a train.

The biggest Easter eggs of all are stashed in Castle Rock's uniformly excellent cast. The enigmatic Warden Lacy is played by Lost's Terry O'Quinn, who also portrayed a cop destined to become Purina Werewolf Chow in Silver Bullet. Sissy Spacek (Deaver's adoptive mother, whose dementia-ravaged memory may hold a clue to what happened to him) first got onto our radar as the bullied and vengeful Carrie. The nameless prisoner is played by Bill Skarsgard, who radiated evil right through his clown makeup in It.

And though Scott Glenn has never appeared in a King adaption, his character Alan Pangborn—the sheriff who rescued the young Dearborn from his frozen sojourn in the wilderness—is playing a character who more than any other symbolizes the toll that the town takes on its citizen-hostages.

Readers of King novels have watched Pangborn stand by helplessly as his family members and lovers succumb. In Castle Rock, he's an old, punched-out man with little to say except one final piece of advice: "Don't let that fuckin' kid out." His eyes are faded; his words, maybe not.

Enlarge / An artist's view of the Starliner spacecraft en route to the International Space Station. (credit: Boeing)

One of the biggest rivalries in the modern aerospace industry is between Boeing and SpaceX. Despite their radically different cultures, the aerospace giant and the smaller upstart compete for many different kinds of contracts, and perhaps nowhere has the competition been more keen than for NASA funds.

In 2014, both Boeing and SpaceX received multibillion awards (Boeing asked for, and got, 50 percent more funding for the same task) to finalize development of spacecraft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the commercial crew program. Since then, both companies have been locked in a race to the launchpad, not just to free NASA from its reliance on Russia to reach space but also for the considerable esteem that will accompany becoming the first private company in the world to fly humans into orbit.

A narrow margin

Although both Boeing and SpaceX have established various launch dates—first in 2017, and now slipped to 2018 and 2019—NASA hasn't publicly tipped its hand on which company is actually ahead in the race. Now, however, a new report from the US Government Accountability Office has provided a window into NASA's internal thinking on commercial crew launch dates.

Last week, the Welsh government approved take-home abortion pills, meaning most medical, non-surgical abortions can be done at home, without the supervision of a doctor.

Currently, Scotland, Sweden, and France have similar protocols in place, though England lags behind on this front. Given that around three-fourths of the total abortions performed in Wales last year were medical, this recent change could mean easier abortion access for women who live in remote parts of the country.

Medical abortions are typically available in the first trimester, up to about nine weeks of gestation. In the past, women had to take two pills while supervised at a clinic. On her first visit, a woman will take mifepristone. Between 24 and 72 hours later, she must return to the clinic to take a second pill, called misoprostol.

Wales' new policy means women can take these pills in the privacy and comfort of their own homes. Harmful side effects are rare and the instructions are not particularly difficult to follow, so this risks are low. The benefits to women, meanwhile, are real and significant.

Misoprostol induces normal-but-heavy bleeding, and it's not always clear when it will begin. Women who must travel any serious distance to attend a clinic—either in a car or on public transit—were subjected under the old policy to unpredictable inconveniences and embarrassment. The new policy recognizes women's competence to decide when they need medical attention, and spares them the indigity of bleeding while in transit.

The new measure could also help women reduce time they must take off of work, a retired nurse named Bronwen Davies told the BBC. Administering the pills at home means they don't need to leave a job in the middle of the day or workweek to comply with clinic hours.

Medical, non-surgical abortions aren't growing in popularity just across the pond—they're on the rise in the U.S. as well. In 2014, Planned Parenthood reported that 43 percent of total abortions performed by the center were pill-induced, compared with just 35 percent in 2010.

As media outlets and pundits stoke pro-choicers' fears that the Trump administration is moving toward a world where Roe v. Wade is repealed, and abortion activists warn us that so-called coat hanger abortions will rise, it's worth considering whether these worries reflect modern abortion practices.

As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has previously written, coat hanger imagery might not be an accurate portrayal of what a Roe-repealed America would look like. In all likelihood, we'd see the rise of pill-induced medical abortions, and perhaps increased demand for black-market mifepristone and misoprostol.

There would, of course, be real medical concerns associated with a dramatic increase in DIY abortions, particularly if criminal penalties are signed into law. Would women who experience complications from medical abortion be able to seek emergency medical care without suffering legal consequences? What kinds of quality control issues are likely to arise when women get their medicine from mysterious sources rather than legal pharmacies?

The idea of DIY abortions shouldn't instill women with nearly as much fear as the name implies––they're likely already done in many parts of the U.S., where onerous abortion restrictions have made it harder for women to go into clinics.

Economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz detailed this issue in a 2016 New York Times article. When he looked at states where abortion is most criminalized and clinics are far and few between, he found that had fewer abortions and more live births. But he also realized that the margin didn't fully make sense—in other words, some pregnancies were unaccounted for or "missing," meaning they were likely terminated (successfully) at home.

In the ten states with the fewest abortion clinics, women had "54 percent fewer legal abortions—a difference of 11 abortions for every 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44." These were also more live births for women in these states—but only six per 1,000 women. Stephens-Davidowitz suggests that miscarriage could play a role, but that, even accounting for that, there's a pretty significant difference between legal abortions and live births, which warrants further study.

Stephens-Davidowitz also found that Google searches for how to buy abortion pills and how to self-induce abortion have spiked in states where abortion is more criminalized. As data are gathered from places like Wales, it will be interesting to gauge safety outcomes from pill-induced abortions. Early evidence suggests that even without doctor supervision, the two-pill combination is often successful at terminating early-stage pregnancies with only rare complications.

Abortion activists' fears are partially founded and partially misplaced: on one hand, aborting a pregnancy relatively safely in the privacy of one's own home is more of a possibility today than it has been in the past. On the other, an unfettered black market for misoprostol and mifepristone, plus potential criminal consequences for seeking help in the event of complications, is far from ideal.

When Rokhaia Naassan gives birth in the coming days, she and her baby boy will enter a new category in the eyes of Danish law. Because she lives in a low-income immigrant neighborhood described by the government as a “ghetto,” Rokhaia will be what the Danish newspapers call a “ghetto parent” and he will be a “ghetto child.”

Starting at the age of 1, “ghetto children” must be separated from their families for at least 25 hours a week, not including nap time, for mandatory instruction in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language. Noncompliance could result in a stoppage of welfare payments. Other Danish citizens are free to choose whether to enroll children in preschool up to the age of six.

Denmark’s government is introducing a new set of laws to regulate life in 25 low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves, saying that if families there do not willingly merge into the country’s mainstream, they should be compelled.

That is from Ellen Barry and Martin Selsoe Sorensen at the NYT, interesting throughout.  It seems pretty clear that “culture wars” — in various forms — are the big political issue for some time to come.

Cooking on High. Available now on Netflix.

Culinary cannabis made its first great leap into the media world in 1954, when Parisian avant-gardist Alice B. Toklas published a cookbook containing a recipe for something she called "Haschich Fudge." It was less a revolutionary act than an accident. The dish wasn't really fudge (more like a sticky ball of bud and nuts) and Toklas had never actually prepared it; still short of recipes as the cookbook deadline approached, she put out a desperate call for help from her friends, one of whom supplied the Haschich Fudge instructions with an apparently straight face. Hardly anybody noticed it until the recipe turned up as the intellectual underpinning, if that's the right phrase, of the 1968 movie I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!

Fast-forwarding 85 years to the epochal debut of Cooking On High, a competitive cooking show that's cannabis cuisine's introduction to television, it's obvious—hilariously, bizarrely, sometimes painfully obvious—that everybody involved has sampled and then oversampled the recipes. Consider this judge's verdict on a pot-infused grilled cheese sandwich: "The best goddamn sandwich I ever ate in my whole life. It tasted great. But I'm also high as a motherfucker. [Face looming freakishly into camera.] Look at the eyes, kid!"

Sort of an unhinged love child of Iron Chef and Reefer Madness, Cooking on High features two marijuana chefs—this sounds like a joke we would have made over Cheez Whiz and saltines when I was in college, but now it's an actual thing—being handed a handful of weed and told to poach it or fry it or whatever into an edible dish within 30 minutes.

As the cooks putter away, judges drawn from the ranks of unknown rappers and obscure stand-up comics babble incoherently. "My mom smoked when she was pregnant," one rapper boasts of his qualifications to judge, "so I've been high since before birth." Counters another: "I own a tattoo gun."

High Times cannabis columnist Ngaio Bealum hangs out dropping random dope tips, which is how I now know that there's a strain of marijuana called Sour Diesel. I will confess that I shared the befuddled reaction of one of the judges, from a rap group called Warm Beer. "How do they come up with the names for these?" he wondered drowsily. "Who's the nigga that said, 'Chemdawg—stamp it'"?

Whether stoners really cry out for cod cakes coated with panko, cannabis butter and handcrafted chipotle aioli and wrapped in prosciutto—as opposed to, say, a microwave burrito with a Little Debbie pie chaser—is by no means certain to me.

And because the actual cooking portion of the show is edited down to about two minutes per dish and jump-cut at the rabid pace of a 1984 Footloose video, the claim that all this stuff got cooked in 30 minutes seems a little on the flaky side. My girlfriend, who knows a lot more about cooking than I do, scoffed at the idea that a souffle of organic flour, eggs, two cheeses, cayenne, and drizzled with dope-infused aioli could come out of the pan in half an hour even if you were just warming up the Pillsbury version.

But that pales beside my new knowledge, courtesy one of the ganja chefs, that there's something called soyrizo, a vegan chorizo, that appeals to the addled doper palate. Burn in Hell, Alice B. Toklas.

The Trump era sure has been good for shareholders in what the president likes to call the "failing New York Times."

The New York Times Company stock has soared 141 percent since Election Day 2016. You'd have made more money if you'd bought Times stock on Election Day than if you had invested in a fund that tracks the Standard and Poor's 500 Index (up about 29 percent since Election Day). You even would have made more money with New York Times Co. stock than you would have if you had invested in high-tech stocks such as Facebook (up 62 percent), Amazon (up 118 percent), Apple (up 71percent), or Google parent company Alphabet (up 46percent).

No wonder President Clinton has reportedly been going around talking about how the Times struck a deal with Trump to get him elected because it would be good for the the paper's business. Trump has been good for the paper's business. Wall Street analysts and cable business news channel CNBC describe the post-election surge in Times digital subscription revenue as a "Trump Bump."

The New York Times Company stock went to $26.60 last week from $11.05 on Election Day 2016, according to Yahoo Finance's data, which adjusts for reinvested dividends. That's an increase of $15.55 a share. The stock hit a 52-week high last week.

The single biggest winner on that climb appears to be the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu. According to The New York Times Company's 2018 proxy statement, Slim controlled 27,191,500 shares of The New York Times Company Class A Common Stock as of February 15, 2018. Do the math, and Slim would have a paper profit of $422,827,825 on his investment since Election Day, though he has sold some shares between February and today. The Ochs-Sulzberger family descendants who control the Times Company also made some money on paper, though less than Slim, since the Ochs-Sulzberger family owns about a 9 percent economic interest in the Times Company, compared to Slim's 16.7 percent, according to the proxy statement.

The "Trump Bump" has been good for Carlos Slim and the Ochs-Sulzberger family's stock price. Whether it is good for Times journalism, and whether it's a sustainable long-term growth strategy for the Times Company, are different questions, however.

Media watchdogs have long praised subscription revenue for being aligned with, rather than conflicting with, a newspaper's journalistic mission. Academics worried that, say, ExxonMobil advertising would prevent the Times from aggressively covering climate change or that luxury fashion advertising would prevent the Times from aggressively covering poverty. They had few such worries about paying subscribers.

The reality may be more complicated, especially if what the hordes of new Times subscribers really want isn't exactly old-fashioned journalism but something more like opposition research.

At least two recent flaps suggest that some substantial portion of those new Times subscribers seem to regard the New York Times charge on their credit card bill less as a news expenditure than like something akin to a recurring contribution to the Democratic National Committee.

When an assistant managing editor of The New York Times, Carolyn Ryan, tweeted out a Times profile of Juanita Powell-Brunson, the paper's deputy director of newsroom operations, it generated a series of responses from people upset that the Times had declined to publish audio it had recorded of an interview with Trump White House official Stephen Miller. A comment on the Times website said the Times had "made the wrong decision": "A newspaper's capitulating to the 'White House' for any reason at this point in history is unforgivable." That comment got "recommend" upvotes from 146 Times readers.

Also generating ire on the left was a front-page Times article by Peter Baker and Katie Rogers reporting that "Trump's coarse discourse increasingly seems to inspire opponents to respond with vituperative words of their own." One NBC reporter tweeted, "A truly awful piece that I hope is taught in journalism schools in perpetuity. A person in power created actual baby internment camps, and somehow a NYT writer attempted to Both Sides it with words from protesters. A genuine disgrace."

Another Twitter user responded, "I canceled my subscription specifically because of this article. It was the final straw." Another wrote, "I canceled my subscription over this." Even Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman cast shade at the article by his Times colleagues, writing, "the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred—unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done. And anyone making excuses for that hatred—who tries, for example, to turn it into a 'both sides' story—is, in effect, an apologist for crimes against humanity."

The cover of the 2018 Times Company proxy statement features a Times promotional advertisement asserting, in part, "The truth doesn't take sides. The truth isn't red or blue." That may be true about "the truth," but it may not be true about all those new Times digital subscribers. Many of them are partisan anti-Trumpers.

Whether those customers will stick around to pay for aggressive New York Times coverage of, say, an Elizabeth Warren administration or a Bernie Sanders administration is an open question. If they don't, Times shares may eventually plunge back to their Obama administration price levels. Carlos Slim may find his newly created hundreds of million of dollars in value eliminated by a Democratic president just as quickly as President Trump created it.

Slim may understand this. Securities and Exchange Commission records indicate that between February 12 and June 21 of 2018, the number of Times shares he controls declined to 16,897,175 from 27,191,500, and his ownership stake declined to 10.3 percent from 16.8 percent. The Ochs-Sulzberger clan ownership stake has also declined, to 9 percent in 2018 from 11 percent in 2017, according to the proxy statements.

A conservative president who attacks the press turns out to be the best thing in years for a liberal newspaper's stock price. The newspaper's single largest owner, however, seems to have his doubts about how long it will last.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of JFK, Conservative.

President Hery Rajaonarimampianina is weathering the latest in a series of political crises that have debilitated his nation since independence in 1960. In that period, Madagascar is the world’s only non-conflict country to have become poorer, according to the World Bank. Its income per head has nearly halved, to about $400.

That is from the excellent David Pilling at the FT.  According to one estimate, almost one out of two children is stunted through malnutrition.

A committee of MEPs has voted to accept major changes to European copyright law, which experts say could change the nature of the internet.

They voted to approve the controversial Article 13, which critics warn could put an end to memes, remixes and other user-generated content.

Article 11, requiring online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content, was also approved.

One organisation opposed to the changes called it a “dark day”.

The European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs voted by 15 votes to 10 to adopt Article 13 and by 13 votes to 12 to adopt Article 11.

It will now go to the wider European Parliament to vote on in July.

…Article 11 has been called the “link tax” by opponents.

Here is further information.  If ever there was a case for Brexit…

For the pointer I thank Saku.

Turkey’s next round of elections is coming up in just over a week, on June 24th. Considering that the Turks are currently living under a barely disguised dictatorship in the form of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one might imagine that the elections will be little more than a formality. But in an unusual bit of media digging, Bloomberg commissioned a poll of Turkish voters to evaluate the chances of both Erdogan and his AKP Party. The conclusion? Erdogan is holding a lead, but it’s not as big as you might imagine and his nearest challenger could be within the margin of error for an upset victory.

Turkey’s election this month could go down to the wire, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan facing a tougher battle to cement power or even an upset, according to a poll commissioned by Bloomberg.

Erdogan can win the presidential vote in the first round on June 24 with 50.8 percent support and get the backing of a majority in parliament, the survey by Foresight Danismanlik of 500 people on June 7-11 found. But a surprise victory for the opposition is also within the margin of error.

The key takeaway is that any array of options is possible and the only certainty is that it will be very close. Erdogan and his AK party can’t win alone, and in previous elections they got the support of religious conservatives, free-market liberals or Kurds to govern. Now success hinges on how voters identifying as nationalist cast their ballot, the poll found.

There are some issues with this poll and Bloomberg freely admits this. It was done in a single electoral district, albeit one that has tracked the results of previous elections as a sort of bellwether. Also, there were only 500 respondents sampled for an entire country. They’re listing the margin of error as plus or minus 3.5% but that might be a bit generous.

Even so, Erdogan is only showing 50.8% support. He’ll need every inch of that to secure another term in the first round of voting. His main challenger is Muharrem Ince who is only registering a little over 30% support. That makes me wonder precisely how much of a margin they’re expecting out of these numbers. Twenty points is still a very substantial lead.

The question of who will control the country’s parliament is another matter. Erdogan’s AKP Party is polling at 46% and their only significant ally in a ruling coalition is the nationalist MHP Party. They’re drawing 4.5% support, which adds up to a razor-thin margin if you’re trying to build a majority in the legislature. The other parties tend to be more independent with many being friends of the Kurds. Given Erdogan’s treatment of the Kurds, he can’t be expecting a lot of support coming from them.

But all of this ignores one other factor which should be obvious. How many people can realistically be expected to show up and publicly oppose Erdogan? His critics have a nasty tendency to suddenly wind up in prison or simply disappear. Walking around with a big “I’m Voting For Ince” button on your shirt might not be conducive to long-term health. It would be a hopeful sign for Turkey’s return to normality and their previous democratic leanings if Erdogan could somehow be peacefully removed from office by his own people next Sunday. But I remain skeptical that the election will be either free or fair enough for such a decision to be announced. And even if Erdogan lost, there’s no guarantee that he would honor the results and step down anyway.

And meanwhile, he’s still got American Pastor Andrew Brunson locked up in a prison cell and the White House is unable to do anything about it. That’s just a small but important reminder for you, Mr. President.

Enlarge / Founder & CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes. (credit: Getty | Gilbert Carrasquillo)

Federal prosecutors have indicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and the company’s former president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors claim that the pair defrauded investors, doctors, and patients while promoting and running their now disgraced blood-testing startup.

In the new court filing—submitted Thursday, June 14 in federal court in San Jose, and unsealed on Friday—prosecutors allege that Holmes and Balwani engaged in a scheme to mislead investors about the state and capabilities of the company’s blood-testing technology and defrauded them out of more than $100 million. The prosecutors also allege that the pair defrauded doctors and patients by knowingly misleading them with false advertising and marketing that stated that their company could provide accurate and reliable health tests on just drops of blood from a finger-prick with their proprietary technology.

Later investigations, sparked by reporting by the Wall Street Journal, revealed that Theranos' blood testing tech was flawed and faulty. The findings led to a dizzying downward spiral of lawsuits, regulatory sanctions, and tens of thousands of blood tests results being corrected or voided.

A group called Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard contending that the school’s admissions process significantly and unfairly limits the percentage of Asians who are accepted each year. Today the NY Times reports that an analysis of Harvard admissions records filed in support of the group’s lawsuit shows the school is consistently downgrading Asian applicants on subjective personal qualities in a way that reduces their overall admissions rate:

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than any other race on personal traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday in federal court in Boston by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.

“It turns out that the suspicions of Asian-American alumni, students and applicants were right all along,” the group, Students for Fair Admissions, said in a court document laying out the analysis. “Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s.”

So, according to Harvard, it’s not that they are holding back hardworking Asian applicants using vague personal traits, it’s just that so many otherwise talented Asian applicants aren’t likable, courageous, kind, or respected. Wow, okay, Harvard. Are you sure you want to go with that?

And yes, Harvard introduced its more subjective approach to admissions in 1926, in part, to limit the percentage of Jews who were admitted to the school. So this isn’t something new. In fact, there’s more recent evidence from Harvard itself that this same trick is now being used against Asian Americans.

In 2013, Harvard performed an internal review of its admissions process. The review concluded that if the school only considered academic standing when granting admissions, Asian-Americans would make up 43% of the incoming class.

After accounting for Harvard’s preference for recruited athletes and legacy applicants, the proportion of whites went up, while the share of Asian-Americans fell to 31 percent. Accounting for extracurricular and personal ratings, the share of whites rose again, and Asian-Americans fell to 26 percent.

What brought the Asian-American number down to roughly 18 percent, or about the actual share, was accounting for a category called “demographic,” the study found. This pushed up African-American and Hispanic numbers, while reducing whites and Asian-Americans.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit claim Harvard buried the results of the internal review when it didn’t like what they found. Of course, the fear lurking behind all of this is that exposure of these unfair admissions practices could eventually lead to the end of all affirmative action policies in admissions.

Both sides filed papers Friday asking for summary judgment, an immediate ruling in their favor. If the judge denies those requests, as is likely, a trial has been scheduled for October. If it goes on to the Supreme Court, it could upend decades of affirmative action policies at colleges and universities across the country.

Harvard’s most recent incoming class was 22.2% Asian American. Asian-Americans make up about 5.2% of the U.S. population.

Firms involved in international commerce routinely contract that disputes are to be resolved by private courts of arbitration such as the International Court of Arbitration, the London Court of International Arbitration or the Singapore International Arbitration Center. These courts of arbitration compete for clients and thus have an incentive to resolve disputes fairly, quickly and inexpensively. Courts compete, for example, to provide arbiters who are experts not simply in the law but in the relevant area of commerce. The New York Convention of 1958 says that private arbitration decisions will be enforced by the national courts of any of the 159 signatories; thus private arbitration leverages national enforcement but is otherwise not tethered to national law (e.g. in US see, Mitsubishi v. Soler Chrysler, National Oil v. Libyan Sun). Over time private courts of international arbitration have developed a system of law that transcends nations, an anational law–this is the new lex mercatoria.

I propose that courts analogous to the courts of arbitration that govern international commerce be created to govern smart contracts in virtual space. Arbitration of smart contracts will develop a new private law that will evolve to meet the needs of virtual commerce, a true lex cryptographia. At first, it might seem contradictory to advocate for courts of smart contracts and the development of lex cryptographia. Isn’t the whole point of smart contracts that no courts or lawyers are needed? Similarly, lex cryptographia is usually understood to refer to the smart contracts themselves–code is law–rather than to law governing such contracts. In fact, it is neither desirable nor possible to divorce smart contracts from law.

Smart contracts execute automatically but only simple contracts such as those involving escrow are really self-enforcing. Most contracts, smart or dumb, involve touchstones with the real world. Canonical examples such as the smart contract that lets you use an automobile so long as the rent has been paid illustrate the potential for disputes. Bugs in the code? Disputes over the quality of the car? What happens when a data feed is disputed or internet service is disrupted? Smart contracts applied to the real world are a kind of digital rights management with all of DRMs problems and annoyances.

Some of these problems can be dealt with online using decentralized mechanisms. But we don’t yet know which decentralized mechanisms are robust or cost-effective. Moreover, when marveling at the wisdom of crowds we should not forget the wisdom of experts. Nick Szabo once remarked that if contract law was suddenly forgotten it would take hundreds of years to recover the embedded wisdom. Contract law, for example, is filled with concepts like mistake, misrepresentation, duress, negligence and intention that are not easily formalized in code. Contract law is a human enterprise. And the humans who write contracts want law with terms like negligence precisely because these terms fill in for gaps which cannot be filled in and formalized in contracts let alone in code.

I am enthusiastic about smart contracts on blockchains. Smart contracts will significantly reduce transaction costs and thus let people create valuable, new private orderings. But it will be more profitable to integrate law and code than to try to replace law with code. Integration will require new ways of thinking. The natural language version of a contract–what the parties intend to agree to–may not map precisely to the coded version. Arbiters will be called in to adjudicate and thus will have to be experts in code as well as in law. Smart contracts can be made by anonymous parties who may want a dispute resolved not just privately but anonymously. Smart contracts can be designed with escrow and multisignatory authority so arbiters will also become decision enforcers. All of these issues and many more will have to be understood and new procedures and understandings developed. The competitive market process will discover novel uses for smart contracts and the competitive market process among arbiters will discover novel law. Law will adjust to business practice and business practice to law.

In short, the best way to create a vital new lex cryptographia is through competitive, private arbitration built on the model that already governs international commerce.

Here is another question I didn’t get to answer from last night:

Your blog talks about making small marginal improvements, but if you could redesign one system entirely from scratch, which one would it be, and how would it look compared to what is currently in place?

One answer would be “blogging, I would have much more of it.”  But my main answer would be higher education, especially those tiers below the top elite universities.  Completion rates are astonishingly low, and also not very transparent (maybe about 40 percent?).  I would ensure that every single student receives a reasonable amount of one-on-one tutoring and/or mentoring in his or her first two years.  In return, along budgetary lines, I would sacrifice whatever else needs to go, in order to assure that end.  If we’re all standing around in robes, arguing philosophy under the proverbial painted porch, so be it.  At the same time, I would boost science funding at the top end.

I also would experiment with abolishing the idea of degree “completion” altogether.  Maybe you simply finish with an “assessment,” or rather you never quite finish at all, since you might return to take a class when you are 43.  Why cannot this space be more finely grained, especially in an age of information technology?

At lower ages, I would do everything possible to move away from having all of the children belong to the exact same age group.  The Boy Scouts are a better model here than “the 7th grade.”

The NBA is one institution that I feel is working really well at the moment. and I don’t just say that because I root for Golden State.  Though that doesn’t hurt any, either.

A nice win that’ll hopefully provide the foundation for a more sweeping victory later, but this isn’t the home run righties were hoping for. Conservatives wanted the Court to hold that business owners have a First Amendment right to free exercise of religion that trumps antidiscimination laws, at least with respect to catering gay weddings. What the Court actually held is that *in this particular case* Colorado’s antidiscrimination commission was so openly hostile to Jack Phillips’s religious claims, dismissing his beliefs as insincere and holding him to a double standard that pro-gay business owners weren’t held to, that they violated his particular right to free exercise.

Which leaves undecided the key question: What if the commission had been more respectful of Phillips? What if they had carefully considered his religious objection yet still concluded that he was required under the law to bake the cake? Would that decision be constitutional? That’s the question righties wanted answered — not whether the law here was unconstitutional as applied to Phillips but whether it’s always and necessarily unconstitutional whenever a sincere claim of conscientious objection is made by a business owner. Jack Phillips won, but would you win under the same circumstances with a more respectful commission hearing your claim? Unclear.

Would’ve been nice for the Court to resolve that now, when there’s still a conservative majority, but this narrower ruling may have been as far as Anthony Kennedy (who’s written all of the Court’s landmark gay-rights rulings over the past 25 years) was willing to go. It’s so narrow, in fact, that it produced a not-so-narrow majority: Breyer and Kagan felt comfortable joining the conservatives because all the Court ended up deciding here, really, is that business owners’ free-exercise rights should at least be *considered* when applying antidiscrimination laws against them. In that sense the decision is a solid win for the right. The strong-form left-wing view that religious objections to serving gay weddings are necessarily bigoted and/or irrational and therefore can’t lawfully provide an exemption to antidiscrimination statutes is out the window. The Christian viewpoint is a reasonable one. Just not the one that prevails in future cases, perhaps.

Here’s Kennedy writing for the Court, noting how ridiculously hostile the commission was to Phillips:

It’s not (necessarily) that the law was unconstitutional, in other words, it’s that the “judge” in this case, the commission, behaved unconstitutionally in its hostility to religion. And that’s not the only way they showed their bias, notes Kennedy. The commission argued that Phillips was silly to claim that putting a pro-gay message on a cake at a customer’s request would offend his conscience. But when other bakers refused to put anti-gay messages on a cake at other customers’ requests, the commission ruled that that would indeed be an affront to their consciences.

They were in the tank against Phillips because they have contempt for the traditional Christian view of gay marriage and they weren’t afraid to show it. The obvious possibility this decision creates is that antidiscrimination commissions going forward will continue to be in the tank against Christians but will simply be more careful about showing it, remaining unfailingly polite to religious business owners at public hearings and then consistently ruling against them. What would SCOTUS do in that case? That’s the question we were hoping to have answered today but the Court ducked.

Here’s Kennedy’s conclusion, essentially punting the matter to lower courts to sort these cases out in an ad hoc way. Open hostility to either side’s viewpoint is a no-no, but beyond that we’re on a wing and a prayer:

One other little quirk in the opinion: Kennedy notes that when this case first arose, SCOTUS hadn’t yet declared gay marriage a constitutional right and Colorado hadn’t yet legalized gay marriage. “Since the State itself did not allow those marriages to be performed in Colorado,” wrote Kennedy, “there is some force to the argument that the baker was not unreasonable in deeming it lawful to decline to take an action that he understood to be an expression of support for their validity when that expression was contrary to his sincerely held religious beliefs…” Can’t fault Jack Phillips for thinking it was okay to refuse to serve gay weddings when that was the policy of the state of Colorado itself. But that leads to another obvious question: Now that gay marriage is legal from coast to coast, will future Phillipses have less of a leg to stand on in cases like these? They’re on notice that gay weddings aren’t illegal, whatever they may happen to think about their morality.

Exit question via Erick Erickson: If the commission’s public statements evincing hostility to religion were enough to decide this matter, what other matters might be decided by public statements evincing hostility to religion?

Geez, Kennedy put a lot of weight on the statements of public officials in Masterpiece. Might not be good for the President in the travel ban, etc.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) June 4, 2018

Update: Much pithier summaries of the decision:

Basically, the Supreme Court found that some Colorado commissioners are jerks.

— Robert VerBruggen (@RAVerBruggen) June 4, 2018

I'm grateful for the SCOTUS decision, but remain v. apprehensive. If Colo commission had said not "Bake the cake, bigot," but merely, "Bake the cake," would the ruling have been different? https://t.co/ePL87zMXAj

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) June 4, 2018

For those who may have missed it over the winter, back in February, SpaceX boss Elon Musk had a bit of a fundraising/marketing initiative going. He was selling ballcaps for his Boring Company subsidiary, who are generally involved in planning tunneling for the Hyperloop. Seemingly as a joke, he claimed that if they could sell 50,000 of the hats for twenty bucks each he would start selling flamethrowers. Because Musk has attracted an army of fans who basically think of him as the real-life Tony Stark, the hats sold out.

True to his word, he put the engineers at Boring Company to work and announced they had developed the promised flamethrower and would sell 20,000 of them, each with their own serial number, for $500 bucks a shot. But how many people would actually send him half a grand for a flamethrower that didn’t really even exist yet? They sold out in less than 48 hours.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I ordered one in the first two hours after the offer went up online.

Out in California, Democrats quickly proved that the one thing they really can’t stand is the idea of somebody, somewhere having any fun. Legislators quickly began working on plans to thwart the sales and delivery of the devices. Complaints were raised about concerns over wildfires or just sending the wrong message. Musk initially responded by saying that if they didn’t want him selling flamethrowers he would change the name. The product is now called the “Not a Flamethrower.”

That still wasn’t good enough for the wet blankets in the crowd and the state moved forward with a bill designed to block Musk’s plans. But as Ars Technica reports this week, that effort finally collapsed and the bill died in committee.

A California state bill that would have more heavily regulated the use of flamethrowers has now effectively fizzled out in a legislative committee.

In light of this development, there’s nothing to stop Boring Company customers in California from receiving the company’s sold-out flamethrowers.

On May 26, the day after the bill died in committee, CEO Elon Musk tweeted:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1000509888534007809

It was probably too late anyway. The production models were already finished and preparing to ship. Check out this very short video of a couple of the Boring Company workers playing around with them.

Musk had previously said that everyone who had ordered one would need to sign off on an end-user agreement before the (not a) flamethrower would be shipped. We received ours last month and I wound up tweeting a couple of pages of it which struck me as particularly amusing.

pic.twitter.com/D0OzZCxl8n

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) May 10, 2018

Page 2 pic.twitter.com/FbdPPtBJPb

— Jazz Shaw (@JazzShaw) May 10, 2018

New York State also talked about trying to ban the flamethrower deliveries, but those efforts didn’t go anywhere either. Most of the country already has bans on actual flamethrowers like the ones used by the military in combat, but those laws don’t apply to devices which throw a flame less than ten feet. Musk dialed his back so the flames wouldn’t break the ten foot barrier. And if California and New York want to crack down on devices with shorter flames, they immediately run into a situation where they would be reclassifying and restricting any number of common industrial devices. It just wasn’t worth the hassle.

I’ll let you all know when ours arrives and we get some sort of a video put together. I plan on killing a zombie.

Bizarrely, only 3 percent of the animals raised by the farms are eventually sold to restaurants. The rest are sold to more start-up farms. This absurd amphibian Ponzi scheme so inflated the worth of the salamanders that a small, 2-kilogram individual could sell for around $1,500. As a result, people began supplementing the farmed stock by illegally collecting the animals from the wild. “The high prices created a sort of salamander rush,” says Jing Che from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, who was involved in the recent study.

That is from Ed Yong, via Brian Slesinsky.

Plan A, or Operation Protect Mueller, hasn’t panned out well. Although the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill on a 14-7 vote that would in essence turn the special counsel position into a civil-service job, Mitch McConnell refuses to bring it to the Senate floor. Not only will Trump not sign it, McConnell argues, the House won’t bother to vote on it, much less pass it, and it’s unconstitutional to boot.

Hence, as NBC reports, Plan B:

If Congress can’t protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s job, perhaps it can protect his work.

That’s the thinking among several lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who are discussing ways to safeguard the special counsel’s investigation into possible ties between the Trump 2016 campaign and Russia amid President Donald Trump’s escalating attacks. …

According to three people briefed on the discussions, ideas include: Requiring that Congress receive Mueller’s final report; allowing Mueller, in the event he is fired, to release his findings publicly; or allowing him to resign and release his work if he feels his investigation is being improperly stifled.

The effort builds on one Republican-sponsored provision included in the original bill, the so-called Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act, a compromise measure from Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Democrats Chris Coons of Delaware and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

At least Plan B has fewer constitutional issues than Plan A. The president has plenary authority to terminate executive branch appointees, and doesn’t need to show cause. As I pointed out more than once, the problem with special counsels is a lack of accountability, not an overabundance of it. Attempting to removing even more accountability makes the problem worse, even if one believes that any specific special counsel might have enough integrity to avoid the necessity of oversight.

This effort falls better into Congress’ legitimate oversight role over the executive branch. The special counsel exists as a function within the Department of Justice, and Congress can require the DoJ to turn over its internal materials, subpoenaing them if necessary. That makes this bill a bit redundant, as Congress could simply subpoena the Mueller report or his work in progress after a firing as it is. Redundancy isn’t a constitutional defect, though, nor an inordinate power grab.

However, this still dances all around the core problem, which is that Mueller’s doing the job that Congress should have been doing all along. The special counsel was unnecessary in two different ways. First, there was not a specific crime alleged, and even if a conflict existed in pursuing an investigation of a crime, there shouldn’t have been a special counsel appointed until a specific crime could be established — and not just a process crime, such as obstruction due to false statements by peripheral characters. Second, Congress has the constitutional authority and duty to provide oversight over the executive, and the proper remedy to high crimes and misdemeanors uncovered in those probes is either impeachment and removal or censure — not a grand jury.

That’s water under the bridge, though, so we’re left with Plan B. Could it pass both the House and Senate? Probably, assuming McConnell and Paul Ryan allow it to come to a vote on their respective floors, but Donald Trump is still likely to veto it. If Congress wants to move the probe outside of Trump’s purview, then they should do their jobs rather than demand that the DoJ outsource it to unaccountable roving prosecutors.

I can’t say that this is an important story but it’s definitely an amusing one and possibly telling about this cultural moment in some ways. Today the President of Duke University apologized for an incident that took place last week which resulted in the firing of two baristas. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Duke University’s president, Vincent E. Price, apologized on Thursday for the recent firing of two baristas at a campus coffee shop, according to the student newspaper. In a written statement, Price noted “that we are not where we want to be as a university.”…

“I am, in particular, sorry that the words of one of my senior administrators recently resulted in two individuals working for one of our on-campus vendors losing their jobs; and while I am pleased that the vendor has taken steps to reverse this action, I apologize for the precipitous and unfair treatment these employees experienced,” Price wrote, according to the student newspaper. “We must do better.”

The story behind the firing, which involves a rap song and a vegan muffin, is almost too dumb to be true and yet… Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic wrote about it Wednesday:

Last week, Larry Moneta, Duke’s vice president of student affairs, stopped into his regular coffee shop in the student center, Joe Van Gogh, for a hot tea and a vegan muffin. The business was streaming music on Spotify, per usual, and as the university administrator stood waiting in line, “Get Paid” by Young Dolph happened to be playing. Its endlessly repeated refrain is “Get paid, young nigga, get paid.”

An alt-weekly, Indy Week, wrote a detailed story about the incident describing what happened next:

Britni Brown, who was manning the register, was in charge of the playlist that day.

When he approached the counter, Moneta, a white man, told Brown, an African-American woman, that the song was inappropriate.

“The words, ‘I’ll eff you upside down,’ are inappropriate,” Moneta said, according to Brown. (Those exact lyrics are not in the song, though it has plenty of f-bombs.)

“Yes, of course,” Brown said. She says she shut the song off immediately. She grabbed him a vegan muffin and offered it free of charge.

“No,” Brown recalls Moneta saying. “Ring me up for it.”

Brown says she offered again, apologizing for the offense the song had caused.

“You need me to ring me up for it right now,” Moneta insisted.

While Brown was working the register, Kevin Simmons, the other barista on duty, was busy making drinks. Simmons had worked there for three months and was up for his ninety-day review the next week. While pulling shots of espresso, he noticed a man who was upset with Brown.

“Harassing is definitely the word I would use,” Simmons says. “He was verbally harassing her.”

Ten minutes after Moneta, the Duke VP, left the store, there was a call from the manager asking what had happened. Brown, the barista, explained the situation and apologized. That was on Friday. On Monday, both Brown and Simmons (who wasn’t even involved) were called into the office.

At that meeting, Amanda Wiley from Joe Van Gogh’s human resources department told them that they could no longer work at Joe Van Gogh.

“We had gotten a call from Robert Coffey of Duke saying that the VP of the university had come into the shop and that there was vulgar music playing,” Wiley said, according to the recording. “Joe Van Gogh is contracted by Duke University, so we essentially work for them. And they can shut us down at any point.”

Wiley cleared her throat. “Duke University has instructed us to terminate the employees that were working that day,” she said.

So, despite the fact that neither barista had selected the song and that they turned it off immediately and apologized, they were fired. Brown, who had been working at Joe Van Gogh for a year and a half, was especially upset that her co-worker Kevin Simmons was fired. “For [Simmons, a white man] to be fired because of this, it is not fair,” she told her boss. She added, “I feel like you guys were trying to cover it up as to make it not look discriminatory for firing a person of color.”

As for Larry Moneta (the Duke VP) he later claimed he had made a call to the director of Duke Dining but hadn’t done anything else. He blamed the firing on Joe Van Gogh. But according to the Joe Van Gogh supervisor, someone demanded that everyone there that day be fired. It’s not entirely clear who is telling the truth.

I agree this story is stupid and outrageous but I don’t necessarily agree with Conor Friedersdorf that Moneta’s initial objection was off base. Moneta walked into a public place at lunchtime where young children could conceivably be present and heard this over the stereo:

Pulled up on the side of your bitch, she wouldn’t stop looking
That bitch good as tooken, good as gone
I guarantee tonight my nigga, that bitch ain’t coming home
I got money to count, I got bitches to f–k
I got packs to flip, pistols to bust

If it were me, I’d say something to the person behind the counter. Not aggressive. Not rude. Just, ‘What’s with the music?’ If the barista was belligerent and told me I’m a prude or ‘what’s the problem?’, I’d shrug and walk out. If on the other hand they turned it off, apologized, and offered me free food, I’d say thank you and consider that the end of it.

Larry Moneta wasn’t wrong to speak up, but he should have taken yes for an answer, accepted the apology, taken his free vegan muffin, and gone on his way. No harm, no foul. The end of this story. Where this jumps the shark is when this minor incident apparently turns into a university VP harassing a barista (who wasn’t picking the songs). Then, even after she apologizes, he reports her to the people who lease this coffee shop space. Suddenly, it becomes a very big deal and an implied (if not a direct) threat: Fire everyone who was there or else.

There’s an old saying that petty tyrants are the worst. Give someone a little power and responsibility and they sometimes go crazy with it. No one should be fired over something this. Joe Van Gogh hasn’t confirmed whether or not they’ll be rehiring the two baristas, but they should. Then they could look into the Spotify playlists.

Update: Just as I finished writing this story, I came across this story:

Joe Van Gogh owner Robbie Roberts announced Friday that the chain is leaving Duke.

“Effective immediately, I have decided to cut my company’s ties with Duke University. I believe it’s the right thing to do to preserve Joe Van Gogh’s brand independence without conditions,” Roberts wrote in the statement. “I have extended jobs to our entire team at our Duke on-campus store, either at one of our off-campus locations or at our production offices. And, I have reached out to our two baristas who were provided severance so that they may either re-join Joe Van Gogh or secure employment elsewhere if they like.”

This seems like a lot of uproar over something that should have been resolved with the generous offer of a free muffin.