I Have A Problem

Everyone else has more serious things to worry about, but with my semester all but over (five pages to write for Thursday, and then only one exam) I have been apartment hunting on Craigslist somewhat ... obsessively. I made bookmarks of the two neighborhood searches I run so that I can do one-click refreshes, which has me checking for new listsings, judging from my browser history, literally every five minutes. I have a problem.

Cheeseburger Symphony

I'm writing papers tonight, and to help me focus I've got Pandora going in the background, playing a station keyed around Mozart. I just tabbed through the window a minute ago, and the entire screen is taken over by a large, full-color ad that has become the dashboard for my internet radio station. Pandora, famous for its meticulous assessments of users' musical taste and exhaustive taxonomy of musical styles, decided that the product most closely associated with Mozart was Wendy's new Spicy Baconator™ double bacon cheeseburger with jalepeños:



I don't even want to know what targeted advertising will come up on my Wagner channel.

Unrestricted Interrogation of Minors Not Yet Shown to Have Engaged in Culpable Behaviors

Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule have posted Unrestricted Interrogation of Minors Not Yet Shown to Have Engaged in Culpapble Behaviors on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Relatively unsophisticated analysis of the problem of unrestricted interrogation of minors who have not been demonstrated to have engaged in culpable behaviors often begins with the assumption that such potentially harsh interrogation would violate a deontic obligaton. This kind of moral objection to the harsh interrogative techniques frequently depends on a distinction between acts and omissions, but that distinction is misleading in this context, because government is a special kind of moral agent. Moral objections based on deontic obligations depend on a distinction between acts and omissions, but that distinction is inapplicable to actions by the state for which the obligation to prevent harm stands on an equal footing with the obligation not to cause harm.

...

From the Legal Theory Blog via Julian Sanchez.

Spring?

My weather report says today's high in Boston is a balmy 64 degrees.

Naturally, I suspect a trap.