• Cicero
• classical rhetoric

The second volume of Robert Harris's Empire series is just out: Lustrum, which covers 63 BCE, Cicero's eventful year as Consul. And I somehow missed Joy Connolly's State of Speech, which looks important.

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• the profession
• writing

Here's my next question. WHEN do you write? A lot of people recommend when first getting up in the morning, but I've found, with every major project from my dissertation onwards, that I do best when I write from about 1-4 p.m. during the week (not on weekends). And I always stop writing when I have more to say, so I can pick up the thread easily the next day. I never impose page quotas, though, just the 3-hour time limit. I've always reserved evenings for reading, usually from about 8-midnight.

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• legal rhetoric

My Ph.D. student Ryan Malphurs has an excellent co-authored article on Supreme Court oral argument here at The Jury Expert.

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• structuralism
• theorizing

A nifty overview by the great Marshall Sahlins.

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• scholarship

I'm finally getting back to work on my Gastonia 1929 project (which I've been working on now for over 20 years), and I yet again notice that my notetaking habits are a mess. For books, I take notes on the inside cover/blank pages, for articles or books I don't own usually in a dedicated notebook for the topic or else I type them up. I've never been able to make notecards work for me. Once upon a time, we used to teach courses on research and writing as an introduction to graduate school, but I don't think such things exist any more.

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• the profession
• UN-NCA

Once again, our public relations bites. . . .

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• Free Speech
• legal rhetoric
• rhetoric of religion

The non-Establishment principle trumps student free speech. And I am puzzled, but I haven't read the briefs yet. I can't help but think that a valedictorian's message is not the school district speaking, and that, yet again, we don't really understand how to make the First Amendment *mean* rhetorically in the absence of lawyerly clause-bound readings:

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• public speaking
• the profession

A discussion of PowerPoint?

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• public memory

November 11 seems to be the last irony-free zone in America and, perhaps, that's a good thing, but I do agree with Matt Yglesias's post today: " I sort of wish we called our November 11 observance Armistice Day like they do in other countries. Something that I think is missing from American political culture is the thing that in Europe is taken to be the lesson of World War One, namely that a war can be bad for reasons other than it being lost. France and Britain were ultimately victorious in the war, but it was ruinous nonetheless.

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• Free Speech

Once again, the remedy for bad speech is . . . more speech.

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