Worthy of note:
• The news for House Democrats is ghastly:
During a Thursday luncheon last week with DCCC Chair Sean Patrick Maloney, Frontline Democrats — the party’s most endangered lawmakers — were told that, in battleground districts, the generic Republican is beating the generic Democrat, 47-39, according to lawmakers, multiple party officials and the DCCC. This is a stunning margin and highlights the incredibly perilous position Democrats find themselves in. Given that Democrats generally have a three- or four-point built in advantage on the generic ballot, this is a particularly concerning development for Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s majority. An eight-point deficit on the generic ballot could be a sign of a wave for House Republicans.
• Task and Purpose has an insightful and grimly hilarious look at how Russian soldiers keep getting themselves killed by using cellphones on the Ukrainian network that give away their position.
• Freddie de Boer takes a fantastically depressing look at the field of Writing Studies, also known as Rhetoric and Composition, as an exemplar of everything wrong with academia today: the belief in scholarship over service to student needs and demands, the victory of ideology and race-baiting as a substitute for scholarship, the utter inability of academics to understand that victory within the parameters of their discipline is pointless if the discipline itself cannot justify its existence to the people who pay the tuitions and fund the universities. A sample:
I would take grad classes in second language studies, some of them very generative and useful. But all of them would inevitably spend long hours agonizing over the “linguistic hegemony” of expecting second language writers to write like first language writers, insisting that we should honor linguistic diversity and never treat one as better than the other. And then I’d teach my freshman writing classes and my Chinese and Indian and Russian students would say, please, just fix my English so I can get my degree. . . . Obscure research is one thing; a failure to support teaching is another. A truly toxic dynamic for our university system is that the conferences and journals and organizations are run by the tenured, but the tenured don’t teach low-level classes. In some writing programs at research universities tenured faculty don’t teach undergraduate writing at all. . . . Instead, freshman writing is dominantly taught by adjuncts and, at schools with graduate programs, grad students. . . . More than once at conferences I met adjunct instructors and professors at teaching colleges who ruefully pointed out that the large conference programs contained not a single presentation that would be of use to people looking to teach actual writing.
• Apple has filed a patent application for a driverless car with no windows. In 2014, I previewed 17 things that could change with fully driverless cars. This was one of them:
Revolutionizing Car Design: To an enormous extent, the design of cars is built around the needs of the driver. Start with the windshield: the front of the passenger compartment, close to the first two people in the car, is a large and vulnerable piece of glass. No matter how many technological advancements have been made in windshield construction, shattered windshields and people being launched through them remains a major cause of injury and death. (I’ve experienced the hair-raising situation of having a large bird slam into my windshield hard enough to break it). And windshields are one of the hardest, yet most essential, parts of a car to keep clean, requiring among other things regular replacement of the wipers. But a driverless car does not need a windshield (it will have exterior cameras/sensors to watch the road, the way some sensors now watch the bumpers), nor does it need to situate seats facing forward near the front. The person in charge of getting the car to its destination can sit anywhere and check the directions and the road from a monitor. Once you move away from the need to have everything within arm’s reach of the driver’s console, other design changes follow. Air conditioning, GPS, stereo, and video systems can be controlled from anywhere within the car. And debates over things like stick shift versus automatic transmissions become pointless without the human driver.
• Laurence Tribe, given some rope by Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, hangs himself:
Recently, one of your colleagues called you an “important vector of misinformation and conspiracy theories.” The Atlantic has written about you tweeting misinformation, and I’ve definitely noticed that on Twitter you don’t sound like you do in this conversation. And I was just curious if—
Well, yes, I get it. I did make a mistake. A couple years ago, I think, I was somewhat new to Twitter and I didn’t know that the Palmer Report was as unreliable as it is, so I tweeted a couple things and then I deleted them when someone pointed out that I’d made a mistake. I don’t think I do that with any frequency, but what I do more frequently is talk in sound bites and not watch my language when I’m on Twitter, because it’s, frankly, a way of getting my ideas to a larger number of people.
You tweeted, “Donald Trump is an anagram for Damn Pol Turd.” I hear you.
Right. I mean, obviously that’s not an intellectually elevated thing to say…
More recently, you tweeted that “the GOP’s Trump wing appears to be throwing its weight behind Putin. If Putin opts to wage war on our ally, Ukraine, such ‘aid and comfort’ to an ‘enemy’ would appear to become ‘treason’ as defined by Article III of the U.S. Constitution.”
I don’t think I ever said they’d be committing treason. I’ve always been careful under Article III—
You said that it “would appear to become ’treason’ as defined by Article III.”
Well, it was a stupid thing to say. And I withdrew it almost immediately. I try to be careful about the word “treason.” I’m not as cautious, because I don’t want to spend a lot of time on Twitter. I just do that while I’m doing other things. I’m probably less cautious than I wish I were, and I sometimes use words that are not as carefully considered, and sometimes when it’s pointed out—certainly if it’s pointed out—I withdraw it.