Too many Easter baskets

By church’s end, each of my children had received three baskets. Here I’ve arrayed some of our Jesuses and sheep:

We have to keep Abel from swallowing these toys. He also steals his brothers’ chocolates and dissolves them in his mouth – still wrapped.

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Will Michigan win the championship? As I type, the Wolverines lead UConn by nine points. The Big Ten has gone uncrowned for roughly a quarter-century. Michigan State won in 2000; Maryland, not yet a conference member, won in 2002. Each one of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, MSU, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Purdue – every turn-of-the-century conference member, that is, except Iowa, Minnesota, Northwestern, and Penn State – has lost in the championship game at least once since MSU’s victory.

UConn first won in 1999 and went on to claim five more titles.

There are eighteen Big Ten members now. Loyal to the region, I penciled in Nebraska and Purdue as finalists. It was a bold but not outrageous prediction. Purdue unsurprisingly reached the Elite Eight; Nebraska advanced to the Sweet Sixteen having never previously won a tournament game. Had the Huskers gone far enough, I surely would have claimed Yahoo!’s $25,000 prize. (But it was the Huskies who reached the final.)

(A couple of years ago, I picked Creighton to reach the Final Four. I figure, the state is due.)

I did predict that Michigan would reach the semifinal. I achieved 60th-percentile staus this year, which is much better than usual. Yahoo! graded my bracket as “fine.”

Elizabeth Anderson

The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson is the subject of two recent articles in The New Yorker.

The newer article, published this week, surveys her career and personality.

The older one, published in September, reviews her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), which is built around her 2015 Tanner Lectures.

In all the time I was at Cornell, Anderson gave what I thought was the best talk by a visiting speaker. Its content was incorporated into her book The Imperative of Integration.

Her best-known article is “What Is the Point of Equality?”; her first book, Value in Ethics and Economics, is much cited.

I’ve never had occasion to assign her political writings in my classes. But I did assign her 2007 article “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” in a class that I taught on the philosophy of religion. (This article is one of the best in the celebrated anthology Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life; it also appears in Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist. Anderson’s colleague at the University of Michigan, Edwin Curley, presents a similar argument in a fascinating exchange with Peter van Inwagen, in the anthology Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham.)

I’m glad to see Anderson’s work noticed in the popular press. Her recent writings, especially, are very easy to understand. And her arguments tend to be motivated by lived experience rather than by esoteric considerations. I sometimes wonder how this or that view of hers, not widely held nor even previously articulated, could ever have failed to be among the top contenders in popular debate.