Before looking ahead to our weather in the days ahead, let’s briefly look back at June. The first 10 days of the month were relatively cool, with below normal temperatures and plenty of rainfall. Then our pattern dramatically shifted for the latter two thirds of the month, with highs generally in the upper 90s to 100 degrees, and extremely uncomfortable weather. Overall, with an average temperature of 85.1 degrees, this June tied 1980 for the sixth warmest of all time in Houston.
The temperature went up, and up again, in June in Houston. (NOAA)
As we saw on Sunday afternoon and evening, the high pressure that dominated much of the last three weeks of our weather in June has moved off, allowing for slightly cooler weather and healthy rain chances. This pattern will persist for most of this week before high pressure starts to assert control again by next weekend.
Monday
High temperatures today will be about 95 degrees, which is hot, but not as hot as we’ve been. Skies will be partly sunny later this afternoon, with a mix of clouds and sunshine. Rain chances are probably about 40 percent, with the majority of showers developing near the coast this afternoon and then migrating inland. As we saw on Sunday, some thunderstorms are possible. Winds will be generally light, out of the south or southeast, at about 10 mph. Lows tonight will drop to around 80 degrees, or just below.
Tuesday
Conditions will be more or less the same for the Fourth of July, albeit with slightly better shower coverage. Let’s call it a 50 percent chance of rain. Fortunately, it does appear as though most of these showers will be diurnal in nature, assisted by daytime heating. This means that by the evening hours, and particularly after sunset, the majority of rain should be ending. This should allow for fireworks to proceed in most locations.
Wednesday and Thursday
Rain chances will peak during the middle of the week as low pressure and tropical moisture seep into the region from the Gulf of Mexico. A majority of the area should see showers and thunderstorms on these days, with accumulations generally averaging from 0.5 to 1.5 inches, although there will be plenty of outliers. Partly cloudy skies and rain-cooled air should moderate temperatures, keeping them in the low-90s for most of the area.
Friday
At some point the rain party is going to end, and that may happen as soon as Friday. Expect a partly sunny day with perhaps a 50 percent chance of showers. Highs will be in the mid-90s.
Texas returns to above-normal temperatures next week. (Pivotal Weather)
Saturday and Sunday
High pressure will start to build this weekend, and this should lead to a pair of mostly sunny days with highs in the mid- to upper-90s. Rain chances don’t look to be zero, but they’re probably not above 20 percent for both days. It’s going to depend on how quickly the high pressure builds over the area.
Next week
The majority of next week looks fairly hot as high pressure reigns, and should peak by Wednesday or Thursday. Heat advisories are likely to be necessary once again. Rain chances look accordingly low for much of the week.
HARRISONVILLE, MO—Admitting that he was getting older and it was time to take the next step, single misogynist Rudy Griffin told reporters Monday he was ready to settle down and hate one woman for the rest of his life. “I’ve been playing the field of despising tons of stupid bitches for a long time, and I think I’m at…
Texas residents are currently experiencing temperatures of up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit as a result of an extended “heat dome” hovering over the state. The Onion asked Texans how they felt about the deadly weather, and this is what they said.
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A minuscule handbag measuring just 657 by 222 by 700 microns (or less than 0.03 inches wide) bearing Louis Vuitton’s signature monogram sold for over $63,000 at an online auction. What do you think?
Flowers, messages, balloons, stuffed animals, toys and other items left by mourners commemorating the students and teachers of the Robb Elementary Schools mass shooting are displayed outside the school on May 31, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. | Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The justices are forced to confront the gun policy disaster that it created.
It is fairly likely that the justices will reverse the Fifth Circuit’s extraordinary decision — as many as six current members of the Court have signaled that, while some of them support an expansive reading of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, the Fifth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Rahimigoestoo far. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has endorsed some prohibitions on gun possession by people who have not been convicted of a felony, including laws prohibiting people with serious mental illnesses from owning guns. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, meanwhile, wrote when she was still a lower court judge that “legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns.”
Bruen held that huge swaths of US gun laws must fall unless the government can prove that “the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” And it instructed judges to determine whether a particular challenged gun law is consistent with this tradition by searching for “historical analogies” in early American firearm regulations.
In practice, however, it is often impossible to draw precise analogies between today’s gun laws and those from two centuries ago, because both American society and firearms technology have changed so much since the Second Amendment was ratified.
Consider, for example, the federal ban on machine guns. The machine gun was not even invented until 1884, so anyone hunting for early American laws banning this kind of weapon will come up blank. That said, Bruen also acknowledged that the United States has a “historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of ‘dangerous and unusual weapons,’” so a judge who wishes to uphold the machine gun ban could point to this language in Bruen to justify such a decision.
Or consider, for that matter, the law at issue in Rahimi, which prohibits many individuals who are “subject to a court order” that restrains them from “harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner” from possessing a gun. Notably, this law applies to individuals who have not yet been convicted of a crime, but who have had a court proceeding that determined they are a danger to their partner or their partner’s children.
In defending this law, the Justice Department points to various English, colonial American, and early US laws that disarm people “considered to be dangerous.” But DOJ is unable to cite any laws from these eras that specifically prohibit people who abuse their intimate partners from possessing a gun, because no such laws existed at the time. Indeed, it was legal in all 50 states for married partners to beat their spouses until 1871, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that a husband and wife “may be indicted for assault and battery upon each other.”
Bruen, in other words, requires judges to weigh gun regulations using a tool — historical analogies — that is wholly unsuited to that task. Asking judges to determine whether any 18th-century laws resemble modern-day gun regulations is a bit like asking how James Madison would have regulated smartphones. Early Americans simply did not possess weapons that in any way resemble today’s firearms, and we have no idea how they would have regulated more modern weapons.
Worse, because Bruen held that, in tough cases, the “government must demonstrate” that a modern gun law “is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” the onus is on the government to find sufficient evidence to defend laws already on the books, rather than on people challenging a regulation. That means that courts are now striking down gun laws that few people would find objectionable because, in the absence of evidence that the framers would have supported a modern-day law, the law typically must be struck down.
Bruen is wreaking havoc on US gun laws
In the year since Bruen was decided, federal courts have stuck down numerous gun laws, including the ban on domestic abusers possessing firearms that was struck down in Rahimi, that impose fairly modest limits on gun owners.
A federal judge in West Virginia, for example, struck down a federal law that prohibits possession of a firearm if the gun’s serial number has been filed off or otherwise removed. Judge Joseph Goodwin’s opinion in United States v. Price acknowledged that this law makes it possible to track firearms to help keep them “out of the hands of ‘individuals whose possession of them would be contrary to the public interest.’” But he nonetheless concluded that Bruen requires this law to be struck down because the first guns that were marked with serial numbers were not manufactured until the 1860s, and “serial numbers were not broadly required for all firearms manufactured and imported in the United States until the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968.”
Similarly, a New York federal judge struck down that state’s ban on gun possession within houses of worship, claiming there weren’t enough early American laws that similarly protected worshipers from gun violence. And a federal judge in Texas struck down that state’s law prohibiting gun sales to people under 21 — he essentially rewrote the law to allow 18-year-olds to buy guns — on the grounds that there weren’t enough early American laws prohibiting 18- to 20-year-olds from buying guns.
Yet, while lower court judges have relied on Bruen to sweep away all kinds of gun laws, it is unclear how the justices are likely to react as these cases work their way through the appeals process.
Though Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority opinion in Bruen, he also wrote a separate concurring opinion emphasizing that he would still uphold many restrictions on gun use and possession. Among other things, Kavanaugh indicated that he would support “licensing requirements for carrying a handgun,” as well as “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings,” bans on “dangerous and unusual weapons,” and “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill.” Kavanaugh’s Bruen concurrence was also joined by Chief Justice John Roberts.
These opinions by Kavanaugh and Barrett should give hope to anyone praying that the Supreme Court will reverse the Fifth Circuit’s decision in Rahimi. Perhaps Roberts and Kavanaugh will conclude that a ban on gun possession by domestic abusers is analogous to bans on “the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,” which both justices have signaled are consistent with US historical tradition. Or perhaps Barrett will conclude that people subject to restraining orders are sufficiently “dangerous” that the national legislature may prevent them from possessing a firearm.
But if this discussion of Bruen’s aftermath proves anything, it should be that the fate of American guns laws is likely to come down to individual judges’ and justices’ arbitrary conclusions about which modern laws are sufficiently similar to laws from two or three centuries ago to justify the modern law’s continued existence.
Is a place of worship a “sensitive place,” similar enough to a school or a government building to justify a restriction on guns? Is a high school senior with a gun sufficiently “dangerous” to justify requiring them to wait until they are old enough to buy beer before they can also buy an AR-15? There are no clear-cut answers to these questions, and the Court’s approach to them is likely to turn less on objective principles of law than on whether John, Brett, and Amy think that a particular gun regulation should be upheld.
Before Bruen, federal appeals courts united around a Second Amendment framework that could be fairly easily applied by any competent federal judge. “Severe burdens” on the right to bear arms, such as a law prohibiting gun possession in the home, were subject to “strict scrutiny,” an unforgiving-but-familiar test that most law students are taught in their first year of classes. Meanwhile, “less onerous” laws were subject to “intermediate scrutiny,” a more forgiving test that is also taught to law students in their introduction to constitutional law.
This familiar framework, which required judges to use tools that they already know how to use, led to much more predictable outcomes than the chaotic appeal to historical analogies demanded by Bruen.
In an ideal world, the Court would recognize that its decision in Bruen is a failure that should be overruled. It offers no meaningful guidance to lower court judges trying to decide which gun laws should be struck down. It endangers laws that no sensible person would oppose, such as the law at issue in Rahimi. And it requires judges to ask silly questions, like whether a ban on domestic abusers owning guns is sufficiently similar to a 1662 English law allowing the Crown to seize guns from people it determined to be “dangerous to the Peace of the Kingdom.”
Realistically, a decision overruling Bruen is unlikely. But, at the very least, the Court could try to use the Rahimi case to rework the Bruen framework so that it no longer produces results that are completely arbitrary.
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
I’m off for the long holiday weekend. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.
1. My boss is making threats about the Mafia to me
My manager has on several occasions issued indirect threats, for lack of better wording. There have been several times over the last two years, but this past year has been awful and to the point that I’m having difficulty trying to do my work.
In January I did mess up badly and tried to fix it. I should have brought it up but didn’t feel comfortable because of the “shoot the messenger” culture here, unless you are a select few who can get away with anything. My manager told me a story about a former business partner who sued for monetary compensation and later approached the manager and his spouse while they were out shopping and confronted them about the lawsuit and there were accusations of lying. After telling me this story, his next words were, “I told him to never approach us again. You don’t mess with the mob.”
The most recent event was after we disagreed on something that would have resulted in heavy fines for the business if discovered. We were at a stalemate, so I asked another manager for an opinion. My supervisor was livid and told me to never go to another manager again over our issues. A few weeks later, we were headed to a conference, alone in the same vehicle, and this time I was told, “You shouldn’t piss off people with connections.” It was the manner of speech, body language, and the tone with which the words were spoken that sent chills through me. This individual isn’t known for being highly ethical, but I never thought staff would have intimidating comments directed at them.
I’m job searching and am fairly certain my manager is going to push to have me let go. We don’t have an HR department and I don’t think going to another manager will help. Our company is less than 30 people with three owners. Any advice until I find another job/they fire me?
Your boss is an incredible ass. But unless you have real reason to fear that he’d sic the mob on you — which seems fairly unlikely, unless you’ve seen evidence to the contrary — I’d internally roll your eyes and ignore the remarks. The type of person who makes this type of comment is usually someone who wants to appear more intimidating than they actually are. And dropping comments like “you shouldn’t piss off people with connections” into work-related conversations is so far beyond the line of reasonable behavior that you can just write this guy off as a complete buffoon. (I’d also be tempted to respond to any future threats by playing dumb and asking, “What do you mean?” and seeing how far he’s willing to go with this discussion.)
Alternately, you could just say directly, “Bob, it’s hard to have a work conversation with you when you threaten me with mob connections. Do you really mean that you’d like to have someone break my kneecaps over a work issue?” I tend to think that directly calling out ridiculousness will often put an end to it.
2. My new coworker is acting like she’s my manager
I am a writer at a small digital marketing agency (less than 20 people) and a new person was just hired as a “senior copywriter and digital strategist.” This would place her above me in the hierarchy, except we don’t have any real hierarchy … and she doesn’t have the writing experience to be a senior copywriter. And my boss told me before she was hired that he wasn’t trying to make someone my manager. Except, she is acting like my manager. She is often checking in on projects I’m working on and wants to meet every afternoon to see where I’m at. She hasn’t been here for a week yet!
I have a feeling the owner of the company has told her that she is in charge and then has told me that there is no hierarchy just so he can avoid confrontation. It also is highly possible that I’m just reacting badly to having an authority thrust upon me after several months of being my on my own and managing my own projects. And I don’t think I would feel this territorial if I knew she had writing experience and could actually mentor me. I know she doesn’t have the experience and instead I’m feeling micromanaged.
I’m trying to let go of feeling territorial and welcome her to the team. She is very nice and I like her as a person. I want to sit down with her and basically define our work relationship because it’s increasingly frustrating to not know exactly how we are supposed to interact. But I’m not sure how that conversation should go. Do you have any advice for me?
Talk to your boss first! Tell him that you’re getting the sense that your coworker thinks she’s supposed to be managing you (and be specific that she’s checking up on your projects and asking for daily status meetings about your work) and that you want to confirm with him that that she’s not in fact your manager before you talk to her. If he’s actually told her that she should manage you, this will hopefully prompt him to tell you that yes, she’s actually supposed to be doing these things. (And if that’s the case, boo to him for not telling you that earlier.)
But assuming that he says that no, you don’t report to her, then you can talk to her and say something like, “Hey, I normally manage this stuff on my own and report directly to Bob on my work. I checked with him to make sure he doesn’t want to change that and he confirmed that it’ll continue that way.” You could add, “I’ve gotten the sense you’re interested in me updating you on my projects the way I might with a manager, so I wanted to make sure there wasn’t any confusion there and you know I report to Bob.”
It’s also possible that she knows she’s not your official manager but thinks that as the “senior” copywriter she’s supposed to be in a sort of team lead role (and your boss may have told her that). If that turns out to be the case, there’s room for you to talk about what you would and wouldn’t find helpful (for example, you might propose a weekly meeting instead of daily ones, and if there’s something she could do that you’d welcome — like running interference with Bob or with clients — this is a good place to mention it and it might redirect her energy in a way you’ll be glad about).
3. I’m embarrassed that my employee paid cash at a business lunch
One of my employees embarrassed me at a business lunch. When it came time to pay, everyone took out either their own credit or debit cards or their company one. My employee paid with cash with exact change and also left a cash tip. When I spoke to her about it, she didn’t see what she did wrong. There were four other people from different companies at this lunch. My employee said she doesn’t have a debit or credit card and uses cash exclusively. I explained this is not acceptable for business meals and events, but she says she will continue using cash only.
She is different, she is under 25 and does not have social media or any internet presence and when her name is searched for nothing comes up. She has a landline and no mobile phone and she doesn’t own a TV or any kind of streaming service, and when she isn’t job searching she only checks her email once or twice a week. But she doesn’t see why using cash a business meal or event is a faux pas or misstep. As her supervisor, am I able to mandate her to use an electronic payment? She has refused all attempts so far and says she won’t change.
What?! I am baffled by why you think it’s not okay for her to pay in cash. It’s perfectly fine for her to pay in cash, it’s not unprofessional or a misstep, and it’s super weird that you’re telling her that it is. Let her pay in cash if she wants to, and leave her alone.
And stop judging her for her all the other stuff in your second paragraph too — none of this is a problem.
4. I just found out I’m interviewing for a job with my coworker’s wife
I’m a corporate communications professional working for a start-up in the tech industry. The company I currently work for is not the best fit for me, and I’m currently interviewing for a new job.
A very exciting opportunity has come up at one of the major tech companies and I’ve been asked to come on site to interview with one of their communications teams. It turns out that the head of the department is the wife of a vice president at my current company. The last thing I would want is for anyone at our company to find out, especially this vice president (he’s a good person and we work well together). Should I remove my candidacy from consideration before the interview? Will she keep the interview confidential? What’s the best way to handle this situation?
Ooooh, that’s tricky. If she weren’t his wife but just someone he knew, I’d say that you could try explaining that you need to keep your job search confidential for now and ask for her discretion. But if she’s married to him, I just wouldn’t be comfortable trusting that she wouldn’t say anything. Maybe she wouldn’t — but a lot of people share things with a spouse that they wouldn’t otherwise share. And even if it she doesn’t share it at this stage, it’s really likely that she’d ask him about you at some point before hiring you; it’s hard to imagine someone hiring a spouse’s colleague without ever asking the spouse about the person.
I think you’ll have to decide if you’re willing to take the risk of him finding out or not. If you’re absolutely opposed to risking it, then you may need to withdraw — which really sucks.
(To be clear, she shouldn’t tell him. Interviewers should always keep people’s job searches confidential, and it’s tremendously unfair that you even have to worry about this. But people do sometimes violate that confidentiality, especially when they have a much closer relationship with the person they tell than with the candidate. It’s not okay, but it happens.)
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How will you get the news now? That’s a question many Canadians may be asking after tech companies Google and Meta, which owns the social media giants Facebook and Instagram, vowed to remove links to Canadian journalism.
Sue Johanson, the beloved Canadian broadcaster who in her golden years enraptured a generation with straightforward sex advice, has died at 93, a representative confirmed on Thursday.
This my RPG story talking about the Pathfinder 2E system since I've been playing it now for over a year. I also talk about our first introduction to 1E and how to we left that system behind.
End Music: "Sunshine Samba" by Chris Haugen from the Youtube Audio Library
Back in the 90s, Ivan Lozano Ortega was in charge of Bogota's wildlife rescue center. And he kept getting calls from the airport to come deal with... frogs. Hundreds of brightly colored, poisonous frogs.
Ivan had stumbled upon the poisonous frog black market. Tens of thousands of frogs were being poached out of the Colombian rainforest and sold to collectors all around the world by smugglers. And it put these endangered frogs at risk of going extinct.
Today on the show, how Ivan tried to put an end to the poison frog black market, by breeding and selling frogs legally. And he learns that it's not so easy to get a frog out of hot water.
This episode was hosted by Stan Alcorn and Sarah Gonzalez, and co-reported and written with Charlotte de Beauvoir. It was produced by Willa Rubin with help from Emma Peaslee. It was edited by Jess Jiang. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Josh Newell. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
Arkin knew from childhood that he wanted to be an actor, and he spent a lifetime performing — the Academy Award winner appeared in more than 100 films in a career spanning over seven decades.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor read an impassioned dissent from the bench in a case where a majority of justices sided with a Colorado web designer who refused to create websites for same-sex weddings.
(Image credit: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Today marks our 18th straight day of heat advisories or heat warnings. We close June on the same note we’ve been singing (with rampant falsetto) since mid-month. Heat waves are often judged by how many temperature records are broken. So have there been many temperature records broken the last couple weeks? The answer is not really.
For the month of June, through yesterday, we set or tied a total of zero record highs at Bush, two at Hobby, none at Galveston, and none in College Station. Despite the general lack of record highs, we’ve managed to reach a frequency and consistency of 110+ heat index values that is rare for this region. It’s why we emphasized that this would be an abnormal heat wave for us.
Nighttimes have been more intriguing, with seven record warm minimum temperatures set or tied at Bush, seven at Hobby, none in Galveston, and five in College Station. The lack of any nighttime relief really contributes to defining how rough this has been.
Fortunately, we are past the peak of things it seems and we can start discussing how this will change.
Today and tomorrow
More of the same. Sunny and hot, with highs in the upper-90s and lows near 80, and a near zero chance of rain. Heat advisories will likely be needed for one more day tomorrow.
Sunday & Monday
This will be the transition period. Look for generally more of the same again. Expect mid to upper-90s for highs and upper-70s to near 80 for lows. However, the new wrinkle on these days will be rain chances. Sunday looks meager at best and mostly south and east of Houston. Let’s call it a 5 to 10 percent chance of a shower Sunday. That’s better than zero, but the odds remain stacked against you. By Monday, that rain chance should improve to 20 percent or so. Better!
Rain chances creep up on Sunday and Monday, with a slightly better chance on Tuesday. Most places will not see rain through Tuesday, however. Many will see rain at some point Wednesday through Saturday.
Fourth of July Tuesday
This will be the trickiest day, because I could see our rain chances fizzling here or being something like 10 to 20 percent again. Or, coverage could increase a fair bit during the afternoon hours, with not everyone seeing rain but some folks needing to scurry indoors for a time. Let’s call it about a 30 percent chance of rain on Tuesday afternoon, with the highest odds south and east of Houston; higher chances than Monday but still relatively low. As of now, I’d expect that most evening events will be able to go off without issue.
Independence Day temperatures will top off in the mid-90s for Houston. (Pivotal Weather)
Look for mid-90s or a little hotter on Tuesday with evening temperatures generally dropping back into the mid to upper 80s for fireworks or other activities.
Wednesday through Friday
We get a big boost in moisture beginning Wednesday, and this should translate to more scattered to numerous showers and storms through the late week period. While it’s tough to pin down the exact timing of rain chances each day, I would say that the chance is at least 50 to 60 percent on all three days. So there’s a good chance your neighborhood should see at least some rain at some point later next week.
Rain totals through next Friday actually exist! Take these numbers as an approximate average. Some will see less, others more. (Pivotal Weather)
Due to the clouds and showers, we should see high temperatures ease back into the low (!) or mid-90s at worst, more seasonable for early July. Nighttimes should be more firmly in the 70s. Eric will be back in the saddle Monday. Until then, stay cool!
SAN DIEGO—In an attempt to cater to a wider demographic, a local strip club reportedly installed a single pinball machine Friday to occupy the shy members of bachelor parties. “We’re pleased to announce the arrival of our new Addams Family pinball game, which shy members of a bachelor party can congregate around,…
IRVINE, CA—Ambivalently promoting the menu item in a media campaign that launched Friday, a new Taco Bell ad urges customers to consider whether they are actually interested in trying the fast food restaurant’s Beefy 5-Layer Burrito. “Look, our goal at Taco Bell is to hawk whatever slop is gonna make us a buck, but…
BINGHAMTON, NY—Officials and community leaders gathered for a grand unveiling Friday after a multimillion-dollar city beautification project reportedly resulted in three new blades of grass. The project, which sources confirmed got underway 13 years and three mayoral administrations ago, originally featured several…
“Justice Samuel Alito took luxury fishing vacation with GOP billionaire who later had cases before the court.” — ProPublica
“The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard in a major victory for conservative activists, ending the systematic consideration of race in the admissions process.” — NBC News
- - -
We, the conservative justices of the Supreme Court, have ruled against Harvard and UNC, striking down affirmative action for college admissions across the country. For a detailed explanation of our ruling, feel free to read the court’s majority decision. But in a nutshell, we believe the only people who should ever get extra consideration are those who invite you to hang out on their boats.
You see, it came down to a matter of fairness. Getting into college should be based purely on merit—getting good grades, scoring highly on the SAT, writing a compelling essay, and participating in extracurriculars that speak to your interests. And if one of those interests happens to be sailing, and your family happens to have a 120-foot sailing yacht, and you happen to go on an eight-day pleasure cruise in the Mediterranean the summer before your senior year of high school, and your dad happens to invite the head of admissions at Dartmouth on that trip, we’d see absolutely no problem with that. Just as long as you keep the conversation to nautical topics like, “What are some of your favorite knots?” Or “Spinnakers, am I right?” Or “Say, how competitive is the Dartmouth sailing team, anyhow?”
As we deliberated on the Harvard case, we saw two major sources of inequity in the admissions process:
A significant percentage of students admitted to Harvard were either legacies or were related to Harvard faculty and staff.
Harvard was admitting Black and Latino students at slightly higher rates than in the 1960s, though still not proportionate to their respective populations.
To determine which was a bigger ethical issue, we asked ourselves a simple question: In which of these two groups are you more likely to own a catamaran? After considering that, the majority opinion practically wrote itself.
The liberal justices argued that rolling back affirmative action would undo decades of progress designed to right the wrongs of systemic inequality. But we don’t believe in being on the “right” side of this issue. We believe in being on the “starboard” side of this issue—the side that favors folks who invite us over for cocktails on the starboard sides of their boats. Which, incidentally, is the right side of the boat, so we think that counts.
Regarding the merits of the decision, some legal scholars felt it was dubious to cite the 14th Amendment, which the court had previously used to argue the exact opposite ruling in favor of affirmative action decades ago. But not one of those scholars invited us on a deep-sea fishing trip to Alaska, or an island-hopping jaunt in the Caribbean, or even a day sail on the Potomac. We might have been more sympathetic to their counterpoints had they thought to do that.
It’s also worth noting that, while the 14th Amendment says many things about equal protection and due process, it says absolutely nothing about boats, or at what point a “boat trip with friends” becomes a “quid pro quo.” Nobody needs a reason to invite you on their boat. Besides, who wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon with Clarence Thomas simply for the divine pleasure of his company?
For those who say the college experience is enriched by having classmates of different backgrounds and perspectives, we can say with certainty that the college experience is also enriched by knowing more people who own megayachts. Depending on how you define “enrich,” of course.
And if you do eventually strike it rich and want to bring us along for a sail, we’d be happy to hop on board. Better yet, hand us a mai tai and one of those captain’s hats with a little anchor on it, and you might find we’ll be “on board” with just about anything.
