Hey everyone...

There's a rather interesting, but extremely long, article on Europe by Joe Klein in Slate. (Ack, I fortunately corrected 5 minutes later, my misnaming him "Joel Klein" who if i remember correctly worked doing antitrust for the Clinton Justice Dept.) Here's the link. Its about as long as something can be and still be called an article, its almost closer to a book...

Speaking of books, I'm reading about one a day, and I just finished Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" which is amazing and I highly recommend. He's not only a brilliant writer, he lived a fascinating life, and this is about as good an autobiography as I've ever read (can't really think what would come close). Furthermore it fulfills the niche of "Book by Nabokov Which I Can Recommend To Anyone (e.g. my mother)" which Lolita obviously dosen't fulfill despite its brilliance, and I just didn't like Pale Fire so much (sorry Alec, speaking of sorry Alec, I didn't terribly like "Foucault's Pendulum" despite absolutely loving "The Name of the Rose").

The one bad thing about reading "Speak, Memory" is that when compared to Nabokov, I seem rather boring. I currently don't have any obsessions on par with his butterfly catching, or even chess problem composing, and I don't know 4 languages, etc. Ah well...

Back to the internet... The Volokh Conspiracy has finally released the results of their survey on homonyms. Here's what they found.

Lastly, as you all know I've become a supreme court junkie, and I'm rather strongly in support of school choice, thus last weeks supreme court decision was a rather joyful day... Read the opinion here. I would be particularly interested to have your take on the Thomas concurring opinion, as well as the whole issue in general.

I definitely think that voucher programs in general are not unconstitutional, and I tend to agree with the majority opinion on this one. However, I do think the "$2,500 isn't enought to educate kids unless your teachers take a vow of poverty"-argument has merit, and I could definitely agree with an opinion that said the money would have to be more for it to be constitutional. However, the desenting opinions do not seem to rely on this argument.

Speaking of school choice, I looked up today the funding per student state-by-state. Here's a link. (Sorry, its USAtoday, but CNN didn't have the nice table.) Now, this info is a couple years out of date, and funding has changed in a lot of cases (Laura tells me Oregon's has decreased steeply in the past two years), but on the whole nationally it probably still gives a decent picture... We need to keep in mind that this is averaged over the state and so poor districts get a lot less. Nonetheless, look at DC, they spend nearly $10,000/student, and have a miserably failing school system. For $10,000/student, you can have classes of 10, pay a teacher $70,000 and still have leftover $30,000 for overhead. Now I guess building expenses are part of that, but still... I just do not understand it. It seems in DC at least that private schools would almost have to be able to do a better job with those funds...

I definitely think that school choice is not an excuse for actually making better public schools, however I also think that the ability to give your children a good education is something which poor people should have, and giving them more flexibility is nonetheless a good thing.