by Lisa Barnard

I’ll say it. I hate New Year’s Resolutions. Mostly because, let’s be honest, I either forget about them after about a month (…okay, a week) or am just such a complete failure at them that it just destroys my already tenuous self-esteem.

But also, it’s just annoying, really. It reminds me of the type of people I don’t like. The ones who get up at 5am every day just for kicks, and by 6am have gone to the gym, read the paper, cooked and fed their kids breakfast, ran a marathon, meditated, went to a hot yoga class and shoveled six driveways. Full story »

The circus of failure that’s three years old now continues in Ann Arbor. It’s painful to watch the disintegration of a once proud football program, but that’s what this is. I’m not the most avid football fan anymore, but i was raised to be one. Specifically, a Michigan football fan. And i’ve always considered myself a lucky Michigan football fan. Thanks to my grandmother’s mid-life BFA at the UofM, my family had season seats when i was little. Imagine being a five year old at Michigan Stadium sitting in the row behind the band…and the trombone section no less. I was there for the video below. I remember chaos as the band tried to turn their hats and play “The Victors” while 100,000 people went absolutely crazy.

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Scholars & Rogues is in the process of refreshing, updating and expanding our operation (you’ll see some changes in the coming days and weeks, with any luck), and one of the things we’re doing is increasing our emphasis on guest contributors. We’ve always published outside writers, and the truth is that there’s a lot of talent out there, talent that could use an opportunity to connect with a larger audience.

So, if you’d like to write something for us, or if you know someone whose work might be a good fit here, have a look at our new submissions page. In general:

• We’re interested in a wide range of topics. Full story »

I had to drop what I was doing this morning when I sat the headline “Scalia: Women Don’t Have Constitutional Protection Against Discrimination” (article here). Surely it was an exaggerated come-on piece to get me to click (and it worked).

I was wrong. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia really said in an interview with a legal magazine, “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.”

So how important is the Constitution for protecting people’s rights? Full story »

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You may have heard that the State of California is facing a monster deficit. Figures bounce around a bit, but most estimates have the shortfall at or near $28 billion, and the mess has Gov. Jerry Brown pondering Armageddon: enough posturing and arguing – he seems prepared to let the citizenry see how it feels about the reality of shutting it all down. Don’t want to pay for schools? Cool – we won’t have any.

One sympathizes with the people of the Golden State. They do contribute more in federal taxes than any other state, and the ideology of our times has us all convinced that paying taxes is the same thing as flushing perfectly good cash down the toilet. Full story »

Crest (New Year’s Day, 2011)

                                             - for Ann

When time is a wolf,
the year a pack of
yellow teeth; when one by one
we lay us down, or

stop to kiss goodbyes
when one of us can
run no more, then back into
the trees;  Full story »