In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?
– St. Augustine
“There have been many things I’ve tried to write about and could not. Things too serious, too painful, and that’s not the purpose of writing a poem. The point of poetry is to make something beautiful—something in itself. I’m not trying to pour my sorrows down on the page.”
Janet Lewis was being interviewed late in life, at age ninety-nine, the year before her death. The interviewer seems surprised, and asks, “So, it is not cathartic for the writer?” Lewis replies: “Not for me. That’s exactly what I don’t write.”
The notion that writing is not therapeutic, not a tool for lancing pain and self-pity like a boil, is so alien to contemporary readers and writers that it requires translation as though it were in a foreign language. Not that Lewis’ poems are cold. One is always aware that her poems were composed by a single, specific twentieth-century woman. In that sense most of her poems are domestic, even occasional. They are artful without being artsy-fartsy.
Why does the Senate confirm Trump’s picks for key posts — and how? – Legal scholar Jennifer L. Selin explains the confirmation process and the ‘constitutional loophole’ of recess appointments
Gizmodo : A federal court says your privacy is diminished due to the proliferation of video cameras throughout society. “…The federal court’s decision says that video cameras have become “ubiquitous,” and have therefore diminished our expectations of privacy. Police officers wear body cameras now, cellphones have cameras, and many doorbells record your porch. The court isn’t wrong that cameras are everywhere. However, law enforcement has a long history of blurring the lines of privacy with modern recording technology. Politicodetailed how Ring handed over a full day’s worth of camera footage against a man’s will, in order to convict his neighbor of a crime. The network of Ring cameras also was used by law enforcement for years to obtain footage of criminals without search warrants…”
See also Hartzog, Woodrow and Selinger, Evan and Gunawan, Johanna, Privacy Nicks: How the Law Normalizes Surveillance (March 10, 2023). 101 Washington University Law Review 717 (2024), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4384541 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4384541
