- Just before the Supreme Court's October sitting, Justice Antonin Scalia made national headlines by proclaiming that he believes in Satan.
But before the November sitting, Justice Stephen G. Breyer sparked widespread apathy when he revealed he has read Marcel Proust’s seven-volume masterwork, A la recherché du temps perdu.
In French.
Twice.
This article: "Supreme Court justices need to broaden their horizons and read some literature to remind them to be human blah blah ... so here are some recommendations ... about lawyers." However that noir bit from Roberts was good bordering on great.
I enjoyed this bit: In the interview, Breyer called Proust "the Shakespeare of the inner world," a writer who can give readers a sense of knowing the one thing it is completely impossible to know—what it is like to be another person:
I've never read Proust but I'm now compelled to do so.
Yeah the Proust was the best part. It may be unfair of me for taking Atlantic to task for spinning a silly article out of one exceptional quote, but I'm going to anyway. EDIT: I was invited by some people I respect to do a group reading of Proust over the next few months but I was forced to fall back on the excuse that it's over 5000 pages long.
Yes, mobile is great so far but still can't fix my fat thumbs and autocorrect. I edited. Thanks.
Fat thumbs are my downfall. I don't even do well on Mac keyboards. Reminds me of a great, basically-unrelated story though -- may have already told this on hubski someplace. I work with these middle school kids from bad backgrounds on odd weekdays, a couple weeks ago we were tasked with writing letters to some guys in Afghanistan one of my coworkers had been to basic with. So we sat the kids down and explained what was up and that no matter what these guys would love receiving letters for Thanksgiving. One kid was really concerned with his spelling and probably asked me how to spell 10 words in three minutes. Finally I told him that any misspellings he made would probably just come off as really adorable. After the kids left I read their letters to the soldiers and noticed that another kid had overheard me saying that and started misspelling words on purpose about halfway through his letter. Killed me. God I love that story.
What an endearing story, thanks for sharing it.