Pre-Doctoral Roundup

Berkeley, California has been the fifth city I've lived in over the past five years (in order: Chicago, Champaign, Minneapolis, Washington, Berkeley). That city per year streak comes to a close, as Jill and I are sticking around in Berkeley for at least a few more years yet. I'm enrolling in Berkeley's Political Science Ph.D. program. Moreover, the law school is extending my fellowship (and funding) for at least one more year -- which (in addition to making graduate school considerably less impoverishing than it would otherwise be) means that I can keep my connection to the law community even as I embark on this new adventure.

It will be a bit odd to move over to the demand-side of the education marketplace. But I'm excited to get started, and excited to continue my involvement in the Berkeley community.

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Why "Ashkenormativity" Isn't a Thing. I did not expect this post to be good, and was pleasantly surprised. Not sure I'm ultimately persuaded, but very thought-provoking.

I get the technical objection Justin McBrayer is raising here, but I think "facts are things subject to proof, opinions are matters of pure belief" works as a rough-and-ready distinction suitable for elementary school students. And as one of those darned millennial skeptics of the existence of moral facts, I am obviously dubious that such a belief is responsibility for all the ills of Kids These Days.

My former colleague (and longtime electricity market expert) Bud Earley lays out two views on how distributed generation will effect electric utilities.

Interesting article on how various civil rights centered groups view the ongoing debates over standardized testing. This is, as the article notes, one of the few areas where the mainstream left really is pretty fractured.

Did Hillary Clinton steal Hadassah's logo? Spoiler: No! "H" with a red and blue color scheme is not as original as one might think.

A prominent activist on behalf of undocumented immigrants who warned he would be killed if deported back to Mexico, was killed after being deported back to Mexico. This sort of scenario was, by far, the worst part about clerking. There were many circumstances where I felt pretty confident that a regular person -- not always a saint, but not a monster either -- would be killed if sent back to their home country. But under the laws of the United States and the precedents of the 8th Circuit, their asylum claims were doomed to fail. And so I issued recommendations that I basically knew meant that regular people would be violently killed. It is something that everyone who touches our immigration system has to deal with.