Divisible Estates

 When the news broke that the billionaire founder of Patagonia was transferring the company—and with it a huge portion of his family's personal wealth—into a charitable trust, even a cynic would be hard-pressed to object to his actions. After all, the gift constituted a voluntary renunciation of billions of dollars of private wealth and a commitment to devoting these funds to the worthy public purpose of responding to the global threat of climate change. 

New York Times coverage in the Dealbook newsletter though offered an alternative perspective. Prof. Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School points out that such massive transfers of wealth into charitable trust also enable the family to dodge a billion dollar tax bill: which would have greeted them if they had left the company by will to their heirs. 

"Owning the Libs"

 At some point in the ascendency of Donald Trump, a great sea-change occurred in the terms of debate between the American left and right. It was a change so vast in its consequences and so sudden in its execution that many of us are still baffled by it. We continue to try to wage the old contest on familiar ground, even as the main struggle has shifted over onto entirely different terrain. 

It used to be the case, we may recall, that the left and right wings of the U.S. political spectrum were both competing for the mantle of virtue. Both sides could be presumed to share a set of broad social values in common: patriotism, personal liberty, equality of opportunity, the basic elements of an open, free, and multicultural society. Whether they were the best possible values or not, they were ones that every American politician had to at least appear to espouse. 

Progress

 The religion of progress has seen better days. Not so long ago, the Steven Pinkers of the world could tell us that the "better angels of our nature" were on a sure and steady upward trajectory, and we knew exactly what they meant. Nowadays, an email can land in our inbox with the heading "we're in a worse place than I expected"—and that one too hardly needs elaborating. Such pessimism is as self-evident to us today as the optimism of Pinker would have been five years ago. 

The headline in question came from an interview with Bill Gates, conducted by David Wallace-Wells. A friend sent me the link to make sure it came my way, but the truth was I'd already noticed it. The headline, once glimpsed, was hard to unsee. Here was a figure we associate with the gospel of progress—millennium development goals, public health, the gradual amelioration of the human condition—saying that the project of global betterment is actually not going so well. 

More Border Hypocrisy

 The gas bag of hypocrisy about the management of the U.S. southern border has now swollen to staggering dimensions on all sides. On the one hand, we have the Florida governor paying for migrants from Texas to be flown across the country under false pretenses and deposited on Martha's Vineyard—which, if the stories of people being misled as to where they were being taken are true, surely amounts to a rights violation on a grand scale—something akin to kidnapping or enforced disappearance. 

Yet, DeSantis claims that these flights were voluntary and made with full knowledge as to their destination; and whether true in this case or otherwise, certainly a great many of the transportation schemes from Texas to northern cities that have been undertaken in recent months by border state demagogues (Abbott has also been working this angle) have involved migrants who willingly signed up for the trip. After all, many asylum seekers have family members already in the country, with whom they are seeking to reunite, and who live in northern cities. The Republican governors' grandstanding therefore provides a free opportunity to travel to a place they were already trying to reach.

Gaddis Annotations Part II

 With the dawn of my law school career, friends who had been down this path before me started recommending must-read books for 1Ls. One friend was particularly insistent that I read A Civil Action, going even so far as to send me a copy in the mail. Such is the inordinate contrariness of my nature, however, that the very fact of its being recommended has so far proved an insuperable barrier to my reading it. Instead, I would forward my own candidate for essential law student reading: William Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own, in which the great postmodern novelist does for the legal profession what he did in J R for the worlds of high finance and corporate America. 

While all of Gaddis's books are delightful, I'm confident now in stating that Frolic is my personal favorite. Partly it's just that I read it at exactly the right time. Perhaps alone among novelists, Gaddis has realized the literary potential latent in the art of judicial opinion-writing, as well as the possibilities for Socratic dialogue that exist within the method of civil deposition-taking (in this novel's case, the extended transcript of a deposition furnishes grounds for a Socratic dialogue about Socratic dialogues, specifically—the "self-referential" nature of contemporary art being another sub-theme of the novel). 

Exclaiming Against the Gods

I was talking with a friend on the phone the other day when he suddenly let out a gasp, followed by a long "Ewwww!!" I asked what had happened. He explained that in bending down to pick up what he thought was a piece of wood from the ground, he realized too late that it was actually a cockroach. His fingers had made contact with the bug before its many legs started wriggling and he dropped it, appalled. 

I commiserated. Something similar had happened to me on a call, when I had lost my train of thought due to the scurrying of some many-legged arthropod that had suddenly appeared from a crevice in my wall. "Isn't it the worst?" I said. What was terrible about it, I said, was not only the momentary feeling of alarm and revulsion. It was also the knowledge that if one didn't act immediately, while the grotesque creature was still within sight, it might escape; and then one would have to endure the rest of one's days knowing that it was still crawling about somewhere on the same premises, and could emerge at any moment.