Post-Bacchanalia Roundup

I had my bachelor party this weekend in Chicago. That sounds wilder than it was -- my fiancee and I have the same core friend group (we all went to college together), so we rented an AirBnb and spent the weekend as a group. We did split off Saturday to do our own things (mani/pedis for the gals, an escape room for team boy -- which we completed with seven seconds to spare), but by and large it was a non-traditionally gender-unified event.

Still a blast though.

Anyway, here's some stuff that's gone on in the interim.

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In Foreign Policy, Jacob Levy has a neat essay on the philosophy of my great-grandadviser (the Ph.D. adviser of the Ph.D. adviser of my Ph.D. adviser), Judith Shklar.

Also in FP, a discussion of a possible Israeli-Palestinian confederation -- the first articulation of an outcome to the conflict outside the "classic" two-state solution model which I've found remotely compelling.

Labour's antisemitism policy under Corbyn has basically been "fuck you, Jews" in so many words, but I believe this is the first time a prominent Jewish Labour politician has explicitly said "fuck you" back to him.

Iraq has a long Jewish history, which is memorialized in a giant archive of Jewish artifacts. These artifacts were removed for safekeeping following the U.S. invasion, and unsurprisingly Iraq now wants them back. Problem: virtually no Iraqi Jews live in Iraq anymore, and they want the archives somewhere they can actually access them. For the record, this is a great example of the sort of problem intersectionality was designed to illuminate.

D.C. Circuit upholds funding structure whereby FERC gets its budget from fees assessed to natural gas pipeline projects it approves (against environmental challengers who say that incentivizes them to keep approving pipelines). The more interesting part of the case is a bit buried though -- the court concludes that Pennsylvania's Environmental Rights Amendment does not create an individualized liberty or property interest in a clean environment cognizable under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Meanwhile, the Seventh Circuit concludes that refusing to give an incarcerated transwoman medically-necessary hormone therapy -- and later, forbidding her from taking those hormones herself when she's released on parole -- can give rise to a "deliberate indifference" to medical need claim.

Man calls the police on a Black man over a basketball foul. No, seriously. What's his hashtag going to be? I vote #HardPickHal.