“It’s not a living document. It's dead, dead, dead," Scalia said during a guest lecture at Southern Methodist University, while promoting his new book, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Text.

The New Oxford American Dictionary

Interpretation |inˌtərpriˈtāSHən|
noun
the action of explaining the meaning of something: the interpretation of data.
• an explanation or way of explaining: this action is open to a number of interpretations.
• a stylistic representation of a creative work or dramatic role: two differing interpretations, both bearing the distinctive hallmarks of each writer's perspective.

If you interpret, you bring the dead to life. If you want to leave it dead there's nothing to interpret.
The Constitution is a "living" text because language is "alive".

Meanings change; pedants persist.

Leiter is enthused by "Marx's comeback": the Times profiles the publisher of Hamas

Mr. Sunkara also plans to keep writing for Vice magazine, where he has compared outrage over rich professional athletes to outrage over “overpaid” public-sector employees, all of whom he sees as just trying to negotiate their fair share.

That time, Mr. Sunkara’s editor wrote the headline, the Vice-like “Jeremy Lin Is Not Greedy, You’re Just Stupid.” But when it comes to Jacobin’s goal of smuggling radical analysis out of the intellectual ghetto and into the mainstream Mr. Sunkara’s motto seems to be: by any means necessary.

It helps, he said, “that liberals think we are relatively sane.”

The Times piece includes a link to Chris Hayes and Yglesias: Hayes; Yglesias, etc.

From Vice:

Say we do manage to lower player salaries or restrict their mobility—who’s saying we’re going to get lower ticket prices or anything but higher margins for already wealthy owners?

So what’s to gain from the politics of resentment? It’s the same type of politics that fuels anger at teachers, firefighters, and other public sector employees. “Why them?” is the petty loser’s version of “Good for them. Why not me?”

And if Lin’s still earning a bit too much for our tastes, instead of waiting for him to funnel his bounty into the community and name youth basketball camps after himself, why not just tax his (and his boss’) income at a higher rate? We can take some of the money, trustee our favorite sports teams, and give away shares to players and fans jointly.

Lower ticket prices, better swag, less hating.

A hipster G.A. Cohen

Jacobin on Django. A profile of the author, at The Crimson.

Some friends of Remeike J.B. Forbes ’11 joke that he is the most patriotic guy they know. He is a talented banjo player who is committed to learning the national folk songs of the American Left—and when he plays them at home in the Dudley Co-op, of which he is a co-president, the whole community gathers around to join in.

But Forbes has found his politics to be far more controversial than his music. Born in Jamaica and raised in New York City, he earned himself a place at Phillips Exeter Academy. During his senior year there, after serving as president of the Exeter Socialist Club, he founded an anarchist magazine that substituted antiwar slogans for advertisements.

Cohen

I wrote a book called "If you're an Egalitarian How Come You're so Rich?" And the final chapter discusses fourteen reasons people give for not giving away their money when they're rich but they profess belief in equality, twelve of which are, well, rubbish. I think there are two reasonable answers that a person who doesn't give too much of it away can give and one of them has to do with the burden of depressing yourself below the level of your peer group with whom you're shared a certain way of life, and in particular, depriving your children of things that the children around them favor. And also, and slightly separately, the transition from being wealthy to being not wealthy at all can be extremely burdensome and the person who has tasted wealth will suffer more typically from lack of it than someone who's had quote unquote the good fortune never to be wealthy and therefore has built up the character and the orientation that can cope well with it.

We need a return of Marx only in the context of a return to philology.