"Popular" 'Grrls

No less an authority than Foreign Policy magazine yesterday described us thusly:

the popular legal blog IntLawGrrls

And we're pink, too.

Dance, Dance, or No Revolution?

Thanks to reader Virginia Raymond, who recently responded to IntLawGrrls are we too pink? query with a link to a wonderful story from Emma Goldman's autobiography. For those, like yours truly, who've not read the book, here's the detailed version of the one-liner often attributed to Goldman, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution":

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.
I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would live my beautiful ideal. [Living My Life (New York: Knopf, 1934), p. 56]

As Virginia notes, and regardless of what one thinks of Goldman's more controversial political positions, this little vignette epitomizes pink -- fierceness and radiance, principled action and joy, a sharply critical voice combined with dedication to a cause bigger than oneself. Like the Chilean widows and mothers who danced the cueca solo in protest, to be pink is to speak out about injustice despite the very serious risks in doing so, in the process transcending barriers between the public and private sphere, and all the while embracing the vibrancy of life. In other words, without dance, how can there be a revolution?

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

What we don't need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies' auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.

-- The final line of "We need a new women's health movement," a provocative Los Angeles Times op-ed by author Barbara Ehrenreich (left).

Lions and Tigers and Tweets...Oh, my!

You're right. It's a jungle out there. Blogs. Twitter. Facebook. What's an IntLawGrrl (or a loyal reader) to do? (We've joined them all, as announced in our post above.)
Here's a brief explanation and mini-tutorial for those who find themselves lost in the big bad world of Web 2.0.

Blogger
You know what blogger is. You're here! But do you want a blog for yourself? All you need is a Google account and you can start your own blog, linking to other fabulous ones -- like IntLawGrrls, of course. Blogging is a great way to make your voice heard, and to connect with others interested in similar topics! If you're having trouble, take a look at this video tutorial.

Facebook
Facebook is the essence of "social networking." When you become a Facebook user, you get a profile. (You can see ours by clicking here or on the Facebook badge in the righthand column.) This profile is your chance to describe yourself publicly. You can write about your professional affiliations and personal interests, as well as post pictures and videos. You can also post up-to-the-minute "status messages," a way to share what's on your mind with your network. Each profile has a "wall," where your status messages and updates appear. Once you have friends, they can leave public messages for you here. They can also send you private messages via your profile's message center.
To build a Facebook network, you can search for friends, family, and colleagues who are also "on Facebook." You can search by names, organizations, or e-mails. You ask them to be your friends, they accept, and your network has begun!
Facebook also allows you to join "Groups," which are networks of other users with similar interests (e.g. international law or law professors). If you have a business or other organization, you can set up a "Page" -- like a Facebook storefront -- for your organization. This is different than a personal profile; you become the "administrator" of your Page.
Security is a major concern for many new Facebook users. It's simple to change your settings and there is enormous flexibility. You can create groups of friends who can only see certain portions of your page (e.g., students or colleagues can only see the "info" section of your profile, while personal friends can see everything, like pictures and videos). It's quite handy.
And you can make yourself invisible outside the Facebook network, so your profile won't come up in a Google search.
If you need help building your Facebook profile, the Help Center page is quite useful.

Twitter
Last but not least, there's Twitter. Twitter is built on the same social networking principles as Facebook, but in short form. Think of Facebook as being built for computers, while Twitter is built for mobile phones.
So, on Twitter, you also have an abbreviated profile, and you can put up a photo and links to your other websites. (You can see IntLawGrrls' very pink page on Twitter by clicking here or on the Twitterbird badge in the righthand column.)
Instead of posting a status message, you "Tweet" -- that is, you post a 140-character-or-less update to everyone on Twitter. You can protect your tweets so that only users in your network can see them.
You build your network by asking to "follow" other users on Twitter. When you follow someone, you'll receive her Tweets and know immediately what she's up to!
Twitter tends to have many more organizations and news sources Tweet-ing, so it can be a great way to get your news on your phone or computer without having to browse various sites. For more Twitter help, see the FAQ.
That wasn't so overwhelming, was it?
Once you set up your blog, Facebook & Twitter accounts, it's easy to link all three. For example, you can easily send your blog posts directly to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You can also forward your Twitter to your Facebook, so every time you Tweet your status update changes, too. And, you can link your mobile phone to all three: you can write text-message blog posts, tweets, and status updates.
We may not be in Kansas anymore, but the world of social networking can be just as simple.

Arrogant? Nous?

A site calling itself Typealyzer has opened a virtual couch on which to analyze a blog's personality. (hat tip)
Here's what it has to say about IntLawGrrls:

The Thinkers
The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications. They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality.

So far, so good. Same for the image above left, which accompanies the description. But then there's this:

Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

Impatient, yes; that's part of being a 'Grrl.
But arrogant? Insensitive? Nous?
Now, this "evaluation" from 1 of the world's typealyzers (this site appears to have Swedish roots) is, of course, silly-season stuff. The description's an exercise of negative/positive blather familiar to anyone who's ever read an astrology column. Still, it invites thought.
We posted earlier on the tendency to link blogging with other traits often coded as masculine. Is this simply another example of that genderization? Maybe, maybe not. Could be that law professors -- as many of us are -- become accustomed to hearing their own voices, to speaking (impatiently) to those who "need some time to understand what" they "are talking about."
It's a twist on the question of balance raised more than a year ago by IntLawGrrl Hari M. Osofsky: Does legal work require one to leave the right brain at home? Should it?

Women & blogging: What you can do right now

(A guest post from Mary L. Dudziak)

It was hard to know what to say a while back when a law blogger asked "Do Women Blog?" a week before the women bloggers convention. I just kept blogging.

Northern California-based author C.C. Holland now has an article on Law. Com, "Where Are All the Female Bloggers?"

Thankfully, she quotes University of Illinois Law Professor Christine Hurt (left) of Conglomerate, a business/law/economics/society blog, who has been insisting for some time that it is hard to say anything meaningful about gender and the blogosphere without data. And basic data would not be hard to find.
The point I stressed to Holland, as she reports in the article, is:

Someone asking, in some ways hyperbolically, 'Do women blog?' is not reading the blogging that women are doing.

There are lots of women bloggers, including law bloggers. But it can be hard to break out of a particular niche and into the broader blogosphere. For good bloggers without a natural audience, it can be very hard to establish a readership.
The difficulty of establishing a readership is exacerbated when bloggers don’t read and link to women bloggers.
This is not unlike a problem in legal scholarship that Georgetown Law Professor Mari Matsuda (right) wrote about some time ago. In a critique of the Critical Legal Studies movement, she argued in 1987 that

there is a sense that critical scholars intend only to talk to each other. ... The articles cite and build upon each other.

She encouraged CLS scholars to

establish dialogue with people of color and to add their voices to those that currently dominate the discourse.

There was (and still is) a very practical way to do that: cite to their work.
Just as legal scholarship can sometimes be a closed circle, the law blogosphere functions that way when established bloggers read and link to each other, ignoring newer voices.
Rather than speculating about women and blogging, here are some very practical and easy things to do that can highlight the role of women bloggers, and make it easier for newer voices to be heard:
For bloggers
► 1. Take a look at your blog list. If you don’t have women bloggers on your bloglist, how about adding some today? For starters, some blogs by women are listed on the essential Feminist Law Professors Blog.
► 2. Link to women. Moving up in rankings like Technorati depends on how many blogs link to you. Sometimes another blogger will pick up on a point I’ve made, but doesn’t add a link to my post. This seems to be part of the ABCs of blog etiquette. But why not go beyond this and look for posts by women you can link to?
► 3. Help spread the word. When you hear about new bloggers, give them a shout-out. And feature established blogs that might be of interest to your readers.
► 4. Why not add the feed from another blog to your blog? I do this with the fabulous international law blog IntLawGrrls. I added their feedburner feed to the side of my blog for two reasons: there are often posts that are historically oriented that my legal history readers will be interested in, and I think it’s a great blog and I want to support it.
For readers
You have a part in this, since the blogosphere consists of the relationship between bloggers and readers. When you find a post by women, or any blogger who can use more exposure, why not e-mail it to others? Blog readership is often built up by word-of-mouth (or word-of-keyboard).
For women bloggers and new bloggers
A little shameless self-promotion is in order. Certainly send an e-mail about your blog launch to everyone you can think of. Then send an occasional post, with a link, to folks who might have an interest, and especially to relevant listservs that you are a member of. Everyone who has gone before you has built a readership by doing just that.
University of Wisconsin Law Professor Ann Althouse (above right), author of Althouse blog, offers her thoughts on the topic here. And at Feminist Law Professors Blog, University of Southern California Law Professor Ann Bartow (left) weighed in on this topic earlier here.

(Original appeared at Legal History Blog, cross-posted at Balkinization blog. More thoughts on this subject below.)

In the pink

Do Women Blog?
Yes.
More difficult is the question that Mary L. Dudziak raises in her guest post above:
If yes, why do their voices not register as loudly and clearly as those of men?
Because.
There are many reasons, historical, cultural, temporal, perhaps even temperamental. It's no frivolous question. Cyberspace is legal writing's new frontier. We need to know about perceived gender inequality there no less than anywhere else. We risk slippage of what equal footing exists in law and the academy if we don't understand this new terrain. Genuine empirical research on these matters would be genuinely welcome.
Meanwhile, we can follow the lead of Dudziak -- an IntLawGrrls' inspiration -- and make our own change now.
► More scholars -- women and men -- need to give recognition to more women. Even in our more traditional scholarship, we aren't always good about citing to other women. Even when more contemporary options are available, there seems a tendency to choose an old reliable name as authority for some legal chestnut. But by reaching back to an earlier, less gender-balanced era, we shrink the pool of women we might cite.
► We need too to invite and encourage women colleagues to give voice to their thoughts, not only in virtual spaces but also the physical space of academic conferences.
Here at IntLawGrrls, we're proud to do our unabashedly pink part. Are you doing yours?

On September 4

On this day in ...
... 2004, in Samira Bellil died of stomach cancer at age 31. As described in this obituary by free-lance journalist Rose George, Bellil was born in Algeria to Algerian parents who soon moved to France; she grew up in a banlieu outside Paris. In 2002 Bellil published Dans L'Enfer Des Tournantes, which told of having twice been raped by gangs and of violence against other young women in the ghettos of France. She went on to help found Ni Putes Ni Soumises, a women's rights NGO that, complete with rap-tracked pink website, remains active to this day. (credit for Baptiste Lignel photo of Bellil, center, at an International Women's Day march)
... 1858 (150 years ago today), a special supplement of the periodical Harper's Weekly published the image below right, which depicts the efforts of 2 ships, the British Agamemnon and the American Niagara, to battle Atlantic storms and lay more than 1,000 miles of cable, reaching from Valentia, Ireland, to Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. Once the effort was completed, "North America and Europe were wired for instant communication." Unfortunately, too high a voltage was used, and the cable failed about the time that this image was published. It would be nearly another decade before a durable transatlantic cable would enter operation.

An IntLaw, um, Guy?

Couldn't resist checking out this web tool featured by Andrew Sullivan in a post titled "Your Browser Knows Your Gender."
Here's the idea:
Based on a scan of your internet surfing history, the iGadget determines whether you're a woman or man.
My results?

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 2%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 98%

Seems this algorithm writer hasn't got the memo: Interest in national security can be pink. One suspects that in this algorithm all law, all politics -- all news, for that matter -- is gender-coded blue.
Reminds me of that freshman-year essay on which the prof had scrawled his highest compliment:

A -- you write with masculine vigor!

(credit for photo of pinkened White House)

Courage in our Convictions

Eagle-eyed blogreaders will notice that a couple of my recent posts (here, and today, here) have been cross-posted at Convictions, the just-launched legal blog at Slate, the online magazine owned by Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. Convictions is self-described as

Slate's blogging destination for smart legal conversation and commentary. Law plays an increasingly important role in American public and private life, defining the myriad ways we interact, transact, relate and dispute with each other. We hope that, by sharing their own convictions on this blog, our contributors will help inform and shape the American conversation about law.

My co-contributors, I'm pleased to announce, include a number of women featured here in the course of this past year:

► IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Dawn Johnsen, Professor of Law and Ira C. Batman Faculty Fellow, Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington. Formerly Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, Dawn guest-posted last month on the question of investigating CIA waterboarding.

► Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., a number of whose Los Angeles Times columns we've featured.

► Dahlia Lithwick, Slate senior editor and legal writer, on whose work we've also posted.

Other women (we make up a third of the Convictions roster; not bad for the outside-the-pink-zone):

► Emily Bazelon, Slate senior editor, with a focus on health, law, and family.

► Judge Nancy Gertner, U.S. District Court, Boston, Massachusetts, who teaches at Yale Law School and practiced in Boston before joining the bench in 1993.

► Deborah Pearlstein, Visiting Scholar, Princeton University's Law and Public Affairs Program. She was the founding director of Human Rights First's Law and Security Program and a speechwriter in the White House of former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

For details on blog organizer Phillip Carter and our other distinguished male colleagues at Convictions, click here.

The Rosy Future of International Law: Redux

It's that time of year again -- I'm in New York today for the Junior International Law Scholars' annual workshopping conference (generously hosted by the New York Law School Law Review and Center for International Law). Yet again, the conference is dominated by women; 22 of 35 participants are female. The panels, which are divided into four themes -- Bridging the Domestic/International Divide, International Security, International Human Rights, and Trade law -- break down to 9 female presenters and 3 male presenters, will all of the commentators being female (including our own Elena Baylis). The first and third panels are entirely female and the second has one male and three females. The balance runs the other way in the final panel (on trade), with two males, one female, and a female commentator. (We did let in two males to lead the lunchtime discussion on "engaged scholarship" but balance that with a session led by the two female organizers of the group, yours truly included). This breakdown does lend some credence to the theory that the dominance of women in the junior end of the field has to do with the ghettoizing of warm and fuzzy human rights issues as "female" -- a question we pondered about this time last year in posts here and here. But with women at this year's conference presenting articles such as "Protecting Rights Online: Access to Knowledge, Human Rights, and the International Regulation of the Internet," "Beyond Legality and Legitimacy: The Erosion of the Nonproliferation Norm," and "Deconstructing Overlaps Among Foreign Investment and Trade Regimes", there's a credible argument that we can do well more than just the "fluffy" stuff. In fact, I'd say that we're taking over the show . . .

'Nuff said

(Occasional item taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes.)

'I’m not surprised because girls are very creative,' she said, 'sometimes more creative than men. We’re spunky. And boys...' Her voice trailed off to laughter.

-- Martina Butler of Emo Girl Talk (pink logo above), a 17-year-old from San Francisco, on being told by the New York Times of a study showing that among today's teenagers, by margins of 10% of more, "the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls."
Guess that means we IntLawGrrls're just a wee bit ahead of a generational curve?

"The Pink Bus"

All's rosy on the "pink bus" (left), but apparently not elsewhere in Mexico City.
According to an Associated Press report, harassment of women passengers there has become intolerable. (hat tip; photo credit)

Groping and verbal harassment is an exasperating reality for women using public transportation in this sprawling capital, where 22 million passengers cram onto subways and buses each day.

Personal experience, in the United States and Europe alike, tells me Mexico City's not alone in this problem. To its credit, the city's been working on solutions:

Some men treat women so badly that the subway system has long had ladies-only cars during rush hour, with police segregating the sexes on the platforms.

And the city's just gone one step further, joining transport systems in India, Brazil, and Japan in designating "'ladies only' buses, complete with pink signs in the windshields to wave off the men." Only women and their children are allowed. When a man got on by accident, he was hooted off the bus in a couple stops. At this janitor Yolanda Altamirano, 64, delivered what counts as today's IntLawGrrls' 'Nuff said:

Now he knows how women feel.

Self-help in pink saris

We've posted before about Gorilla Grrls, also known as Guerrilla Girls, "anonymous females who take the names of dead women artists as pseudonyms and appear in public wearing gorilla masks," and have, in their own pink way, worked since 1985 to "expose sexism and racism in politics, the art world, film and the culture at large." Now comes word of a militant group operating on the other side of the globe from the New York City birthplace of those other Grrls.
The BBC reports that for the last 2 years the "'gulabi gang,'" a self-named "pink gang" of "several hundred vigilante women," plus some men, has been "striking fear in the hearts of wrongdoers and earning the grudging respect of officials" in the poverty-stricken state of Banda, located in "blighted region that is Bundelkhand" (indicated by dark orange shading in map below) in Uttar Pradesh in the north of India.
While garbed in pink saris, they have, among other things:
►"thrashed men who have abandoned or beaten their wives"
►"unearthed corruption in the distribution of grain to the poor"
► "stormed a police station and attacked a policeman after they took in an untouchable man and refused to register a case"
The founding leader of the group is Sampat Pal Devi, whom BBC reporter Soutik Biswas describes as "a wiry woman, wife of an ice cream vendor, mother of five children, and a former government health worker." She says she and her group are uninterested in politics; they "shun political parties and NGOs because," she maintains, "'they are always looking for kickbacks when they offer to fund us.'"

(thanks to Berkeley Law student Mallika Kaur Sarkaria for the head's up)

Too much pink

Pink is an IntLawGrrls state of mind: a way of looking at the world through a different lens, a way of giving voice to what too often is unvoiced. Feisty, not fluffy. There can, however, be too much pink. And there is, when woman's embrace of her inner rosiness is coopted -- alas, this seems the way of all good things -- by commerce.
Don't much mind Pink as a magazine for professional women. Don't mind at all corporations pinking it up against breast cancer. But the trend ought to have stopped before Big Tobacco began to pinken the leading cause of lung cancer. And surely before this latest :
Was stopped cold by a 3/4-page ad in this week's Chron. The purveyor? That department store that's long been an anchor in San Francisco and New York, and seems to have bought out all competitors in between. The manufacturer? That California-based company that calls its clothes couture (hint: rhymes with "Lucy"). The model? A long-nosed, white-faced lanky dog. Borzoi, perhaps, wearing a pink flip dog-wig and strings of pearls. The product? Kid you not: "pawfum," a "canine fragrance" costing $60 an ounce. Would go nicely with the pink party dress above, offered by another manufacturer for $329.99.
To put it mildly: When 1/2 the world's population's living on fewer than $2 a day, this is so wrong.

Of mother's milk and monks

Another Sunday and the posting choice is difficult. I've been following the monks on march for democracy in Burma, was going to be a bit lazy and and post about a study that proves that women prefer pink. Actually, the prefer the red side of the color chart, thus everyone's favorite color, blue, becomes pink or lilac for women. The authors of the study think that this might be so because women gathered fruit, which is red when ripe. I can think of a more sanguine reason... In any case, I opened my LA Times e-mail alert and was jolted out of complacency by the Bush administration's utterly irresponsible caving in to pressure from the baby formula industry and weakening public health ad campaigns promoting breast feeding, which has many more life-long health benefits than does baby formula. Once riled, I figured it was time to post about Burma (currently called Myanmar by the military junta; while US news sources state these facts the other way around, i.e., Myanmar, formerly called or also known as…the French continue to call it Burma and the capitol city Rangoon, rather than the junta-redubbed Yangon). Protests have been going on since August over unannounced and unexplained hikes in gas and other prices and, as anyone who’s been following the news these past weeks knows, Buddhist monks have been leading massive demonstrations (10,000 monks, 20,000 total people in the biggest demonstration last week), even managing to stop and pray before the home of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. But the junta finally cracked down violently, even killing a Japanese journalist and cutting cell phone and internet connections to stop information from getting to the outside world. The UN envoy was finally granted a visa and was able to meet with both Suu Kyi and junta leaders, but few have great hopes for the outcome. While things are clearly at a turning point, without the help of China (Burma’s biggest trading partner), the rest of the world seems powerless to get the junta to democratize (or at least end Suu Kyi’s house arrest) and China, while calling for restraint and peaceful settlement of the situation, will not join the international movement for sanctions or boycotts.

Mama Awards, perhaps?

Love Lakshmi Bai's launch of awards for absurd political leadership. Love, too, Eugène Ionesco. Have ever since a teacher played the devilish card of having students ignorant of all things French learn the language via absurdist masterpieces like Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve. Imagine a schoolgirl, back in the days before Sinéad O'Connor hit it big, pulling her pigtails trying to figure out whether those words really translated as "The Bald Soprano" -- and if so, why and how that woman with the high-pitched voice had become bald -- and you've got the general picture.
Don't know any women in Ionesco's absurdist literary tradition. But perhaps this honor-of-sorts might be dubbed the "Mama Awards," a pinkening of another lavishly absurd art form, Dada?
In any event, another nominee has to be certain statements on the war in Iraq made by U.S President George W. Bush. The following snippets appeared this week in a Daily Show segment (video here), in which John Hodgman (left) touted "Eight Keys to Success":
May 2, 2007:

The definition of success as I described it is, you know, 'Sectarian violence is down.' Success is not 'No violence.'

February 14, 2007:

Iraq will be a society in which there is, uh, relative peace. I say relative peace because if it's, like, zero car bombings, it will never happen that way.

April 24, 2007:

If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory.

Hodgman's rephrasing of that last point: "Just hoping for no car bombs automatically makes you an al Qaeda coconspirator."

War's holiday toll

2 photos taken 1 day apart on a Midwestern roadtrip Independence Day week speak volumes about the toll that war is taking on women, as well as children and men, throughout the countryside:



4th of July parade, Central Avenue, Evanston, Illinois: Code Pink & consœurs march against war. (photo by Peter D. O'Neill)




July 5, Wayne's Family Restaurant, Oconto, Wisconsin. Just to the left of the kitchen, a memorial to a fallen waitress: Army Pfc. Nichole M. Frye, killed at age 19 by a roadside bomb 3-1/2 years ago in Baqubah, Iraq. "She made the dinner rush fun," a coworker wrote in tribute.

And just over the border, where Canada Day was celebrated July 1, flags in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, are flying at half-staff following last Wednesday's fatal roadside-bombing of 6 Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. The soldiers' widows have requested privacy in their time of grief.

Malheureusement, we will always have Paris

Notwithstanding that she is a woman currently engaged in courtroom activities, we have refrained from mentioning that very tall, very thin, very pink blonde who shares her prénom with the City of Lights and her surnom with a certain société hôtelière. Yet we cannot deny her international status. Her latest hijinks -- checking out after day 5 of a 45-day jail sentence on account of psychological stress (from what? scarcity of cell phones? deprivation of dermatologist? failure to be fawned upon?) -- made instanews in Le Figaro of, yes, Paris, in the Sydney Morning Herald, in Milan's Corriere della Sera, in Hamburg's Der Spiegel, in Dublin's Irish Times, in London's Guardian, in Hong Kong's Standard, in Madrid's El Pais, in Beijing's People's Daily, and in other publications worldwide.
Her stunt affronts all who've truly suffered in custody. For my part, I cannot shake images of 2 working-class clients. One lost 10 years of her own and her teenaged children's lives to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons because she would not turn in a good-for-nothing husband; another died from cancer because prison authorities ignored her alert that she had found a breast lump that demanded immediate attention.
Keep these genuine injustices well in mind. Then, in the spirit of la vie absurde, and in a nod to this latest evidence of the celebrizarrity of global culture, have a look at our colleague Bill Hing's seriocomic commentary, titled, simply, "Deport Paris Hilton?"