Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Culture

Books Law/Crime

WHAT IS IT WITH AUTHORS AND CONVICTS?:

A Bestselling Author Became Obsessed With Freeing a Man From Prison. It Nearly Ruined Her Life: After the success of her novel Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen spent years trying to prove a man’s innocence. Now she’s “absolutely broke” and “seriously ill,” and her next book is “years past deadline.” (Abbott Kahler, 3/24/21, Marshall Project)


The letter came from Gruen’s publisher in June 2015, which had forwarded it to her home in Asheville, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband, her son (the youngest of her three adult children), and a menagerie of pets, including horses named Tia and Fancy. Even aside from the remarkable connection to her book — Sara, 52, had indeed researched a real-life performer named Lottie — Murdoch’s letter stood out. He had created his own stationery, decorating his letter with intricate doodles: two flowers, a tiny heart, a spiky fish with neon stripes. He wrote that former chief justice Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit “described my (wrongful) conviction as ‘a truly spectacular miscarriage of justice.’” […]

Still, Murdoch’s letter piqued Sara’s curiosity. She spent the next hour Googling Murdoch’s case — and the next hour, and the next. She had been in the midst of researching her next novel, featuring a cast of characters whose fates collide on the Orient Express, but her outline, arranged along her walls in a sprawling web of Post-its, suddenly seemed trivial in comparison to Murdoch’s case.

Each new page about Murdoch’s twisted legal saga contained a revelation more outrageous than the last. As Sara saw it, the investigation hinged on a coerced confession, and the trial, she concluded, was marred by mercurial witnesses, the suppression of crucial evidence, and a judge who seemed motivated to secure Murdoch’s conviction. Kozinski’s idiosyncratic dissent in Murdoch’s appeal stayed with her:

“If it wasn’t for bad luck, Murdoch wouldn’t have no luck at all. He’s wakin’ up this mornin’ in jail when there’s strong proof he ain’t done nothing wrong. I would certainly defer to a jury’s contrary verdict if it had seen this evidence and convicted Murdoch after a fair trial, presided over by a fair judge, followed by an appeal where the justices considered all of his constitutional claims. But Murdoch had none of these.”

Sara uncharacteristically wrote Murdoch back. Her package contained signed copies of all of her books and a note: “May justice finally prevail.” After sending it, she immediately regretted her response. “Justice is not going to fucking prevail finally on its own,” she thought, “and that was a really asinine thing to write to a guy who’s doing life.”

She didn’t yet know that Murdoch’s letter was to change her own life. It also nearly ruined it. She is now, in her words, “absolutely broke,” “seriously ill,” and her current work in progress is “years past deadline.” Since 2016, she has been in a perpetual state of emergency. She has borrowed against her house. Death threats forced her to flee her home for months. Her health declined mysteriously and with terrifying speed. As Sara’s friend of nearly 20 years, I worried that she might die — or that if she lived, it would be as an incomplete, foreign version of herself, one incapable of coherent conversation, let alone writing books.

As a journalist, I watched, increasingly confounded, as her casual investigation of an old murder case bloomed into a frenzied obsession. Six years on, I tried to make sense of the chaos that subsumed Sara’s existence.

In the days following their initial correspondence, Sara began her own investigation of the murder case and Murdoch’s long criminal history.

Press

MUCH ADO:

The NYT and the ‘Shadow Papers’: Thoughts on the reporting (Jack Goldsmith, Apr 20, 2026, Executive Function)

[I] simply want to flag what I view as unfortunately tendentious reporting about the memoranda, especially but not exclusively about the Chief Justice.

Without any support in the documents, Kantor and Liptak say the Chief Justice seemed “angry” and “irritated” in the memos and they portray him as an almost bad-faith actor.

I also do not think “the papers show” that the Chief Justice “acted as a bulldozer in pushing to stop Mr. Obama’s plan to address the global climate crisis.” It was the Chief Justice’s responsibility to write the initial memo with his views and his prerogative to note disagreements with others. But he had no power to “bulldoze” anyone into voting any particular way—especially Justice Kennedy, “the court’s ideological fulcrum,” who cast the deciding fifth vote for a reason not offered by the Chief Justice.

Kantor and Liptak frame the order as part of a larger personal battle between the Chief Justice and President Obama, even though the Chief Justice wrote two opinions that saved Obamacare and also voted to uphold a different Obama EPA initiative. (Kantor and Liptak note that the Chief Justice voted to uphold one of the Obamacare cases but say “that was approved by Congress.” But of course the Chief Justice thought the CPP was not authorized by Congress.)

Kantor and Liptak say the Chief Justice “and the other conservative justices have repeatedly empowered the president through their shadow docket rulings” without mentioning the very consequential rulings against Trump on the shadow docket (such as this, this, and this), or the fact that every interim order Trump has won came to the Court preselected by the solicitor general based on likelihood of success.

They mention that the Chief Justice’s legal analysis for the order rested in part on the major questions doctrine that “in the years since . . . has played an increasingly important role in the court’s work.” Since their central message is that the conservative majority led by the Chief Justice is unprincipled and outcome-driven, they might have mentioned that two months ago he wrote an opinion for three conservative justices that invoked major questions to strike down President Trump’s signature tariff policy. (Three liberal justices joined the tariff invalidation but did not rely on the major questions doctrine.)

I also have a hard time understanding why Kantor and Liptak called out and went into biographical detail about the law clerks who worked on and initialed the memos for the Chief Justice and Justice Alito but failed to mention or say anything about the law clerk who apparently initialed the Breyer memo.

Sex

BIOLOGY IS A STUBBORN THING:

Revealed: How Male and Female Brain Cells Differ in Gene Activity: Variations in gene expression could help to explain why brain-disease risks differ according to sex. (Miryam Naddaf, 4/17/26, Nature)

[T]he study also identified 3,382 genes that showed sex-biased expression in at least one of the six brain regions. A closer look at these genes revealed a set of 133 genes with consistent sex differences in their average expression levels across all cell types and all regions studied. “That’s very much a ground zero for the molecular effects of sex,” says study co-author Armin Raznahan, a child and adolescent psychiatrist also at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Identitarianism Immigration

IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS ARE ALWAYS AND ONLY RACIST:

Reopen the Golden Door: Repeal The Immigration and Nationality Act: immigration restrictionism is the Slave Power of the 21st century (Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis, 17 Apr 2026, Liberal Currents)

The moral turpitude (itself a term of art deployed against migrants, but more appropriate for the entire system), by itself, should be a damning case against the idea of restricting immigration. The human suffering it generates should condemn it alone. But beyond that, the economic case is damning, and the lost wealth represents human suffering in its own right.

Economists such as Michael Clemens have persuasively demonstrated that immigration restrictionism is one of the largest drags on the global economy in existence. Even a five percent increase in worker mobility would have the same economic impact as a global regime of universal free trade; removing all immigration barriers could double the size of the global economy. But how? Simply put—workers are more productive in wealthy economies. This flows back into tax revenue, into labor supply, into aggregate demand. The reality is that immigration creates more demand—more jobs to fill that demand—than it supplants.

But ultimately, the case against the immigration regime is moral. On a fundamental level, the freedom to work and live in a place of one’s choice is a human right. It is an intrinsic violation of liberal democratic principles to use state violence to infringe this right. This is even more salient when one considers the element of desert. What did you do to deserve the immense quality of life from being born in a wealthy developed country as opposed to a poor developing country? Why does being born in San Diego versus Tijuana, or Brownsville versus Matamoros, mean that you have a right to a certain quality of life that your Mexican counterpart does not? What gives Americans the right to point a gun at them and say, “turn around, or die?” Carens (1987) stated it bluntly—citizenship in a wealthy developed country functions as effectively feudal peerage. It, like slavery, is a moral stain on the American body politic, and like slavery, it corrupts that body politic in tangible, visible ways.

Kukathas (2021) lays out the real-world impact of “the border.” The border is not just the Rio Grande, or the international waterline. It is nationwide, constant surveillance and enforcement. From employment, to education, to even marriage—marriages between citizens and non-citizens are heavily scrutinized—“the border” represents a constant, ever-present demand that any given person prove their right to be here at any given time. This administration asserting that everyone must carry immigration papers on their person at all times, or risk deportation—the “papers please” regime—is simply a logical extension of this. And indeed, it could be said that Trump is the first president to take immigration law to its logical conclusion—as we have seen in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Minneapolis. One looks to the Anthony Burns case (1854) to see the parallel—Slave Power enforced against an escaped Black man while abolitionists lined the streets. In both cases, the law demands compliance, and the will of the people is rendered inert.

One must realize that a legal framework that requires a fascist to fully realize is itself fascist.

And it corrupts our society in many other ways. Immigration enforcement is a category of law that supersedes nearly every institutional check. Immigrants in detention get limited or no due process. Employers, landlords, and educational institutions must enforce immigration law via the I-9 and E-Verify. And now, ICE has a Stasi-like tip line to report “illegals”. It has degraded the constitutional framework, directly fueling the expansion of the imperial presidency, the destruction of asylum law, the practice of indefinite detention without trial, and the use of military assets to facilitate deportation, all without due process.

And not only did immigration restriction warp American politics around it—it was and is the entire driving force for American fascist politics. And today it is now being used to justify the breaking of American institutions.

Books

ONCE UPON A TIME IN SAN BERNARDINO:

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream (Joan Didion, 1967)

Like so much of this country, Banyan suggests something curious and unnatural. The lemon groves are sunken, down a three- or four-foot retaining wall, so that one looks directly into their dense foliage, too lush, unsettlingly glossy, the greenery of nightmare; the fallen eucalyptus bark is too dusty, a place for snakes to breed. The stones look not like natural stones but like the rubble of some unmentioned upheaval. There are smudge pots, and a closed cistern. To one side of Banyan there the flat valley, and to the other the San Bernardino Mountains, a dark mass looming too high, too fist, nine, ten, eleven thousand feet, right there above the lemon groves. At midnight on Banyan Street there is no light at all, and no sound except the wind in the eucalyptus and a muffled barking of dogs. There may be a kennel somewhere, or the dogs may be coyotes.

Banyan Street was the route Lucille Miller took home from the twenty-four hour Mayfair Market on the night of October 7, 1969, a night when the moon was dark and the wind was blowing and she was out of milk, and Banyan Street was where, at about 12:30 A.M., her 1964 Volkswagen came to a sudden stop, caught fire, and began to burn. For an hour and fifteen minutes Lucille Miller ran up and down Banyan calling for help, but no cars passed and no help came. At three o’clock that morning, when the fire had been put out and the California Highway Patrol officers were completing their report, Lucille Miller was still sobbing and incoherent, for her husband had been asleep in the Volkswagen. “What will I tell the children, when there’s nothing left, nothing left in the casket:’ she cried to the friend called to comfort her. “How can I tell them there’s nothing left?”

In fact there was something left, and a week later it lay in the Draper Mortuary Chapel in a closed bronze coffin blanketed with pink carnations. Some 200 mourners heard Elder Robert E. Denton of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church of Ontario speak of “the temper of fury that has broken out among us.” For Gordon Miller, he said, there would be “no more death, no more heartache, and no more misunderstandings.” Elder Ansel Bristol mentioned the “peculiar” grief of the hour. Elder Fred Jensen asked “what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” A light rain fell, a blessing in a dry season, and a female vocalist sang “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” A tape recording of the service was made for the widow, who was being held without bail in the San Bernardino County jail on a charge of first-degree murder.

Crucifixion Film/TV

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Passion Plays?: Why The Chosen and Stranger Things Captivate Us (Leonie Caldecott, March 30, 2026, Curuch Life Journal)

Then go back to Stranger Things. El is not a Christ-figure. She is not even an angelic figure. She is a superhero, which is an entirely different trope. Superheroes are simply power-endowed human beings. What they do with that power is the hinge on which everything turns. El extracts herself from her compromising situation in a very different way from Judas. She surrenders the power to harm. My gut feeling is that this motive does not actually endorse suicide. It simply endorses sacrifice: of known security, known life. Beyond that, we do not get to follow her.

Back to The Chosen. The point about Jesus is that while both human and divine, he is precisely not a superhero. He will not, as Judas believes, slay his enemies at the last moment: that has never been his MO. Judas’s main flaw is a failure of the imagination, which you could characterize as, simply, bad theology. This is the scandal of Christianity. The author of life, in some way, must die. The Christ will descend, voluntarily, into the valley of bones, through the agony of the Passion. The agony of defeat: of real, absolute, undeniable death. Already in the Garden of Gethsemane, we see him being mentally tortured by what is coming, and by the sleepiness and fearfulness of his followers. Nicodemus caught in his ivory tower trying to belatedly join the dots. Peter and James and John bewildered and afraid. The apostles clutching a few primitive weapons as a ten-ton-truck hurtles down the infested freeway of hell.

No one is on point. No one is going to win. Jesus knows all this. His human body is racked with fear and troubled to the point of collapse. But he goes to meet his betrayer anyway. What follows is the cry of the innocent the world over and through to our time, this time, this terrible moment in history. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

God had to experience the Fall in order to fully comprehend us, and, thereby, forgive us.

Academia Conservative Thought

CONSERVING THE CENTER:

Can Danielle Allen Save Academe From Itself?: The Harvard political theorist is the sector’s most interesting reformer. (Charlie Tyson, March 20, 2026, Chronicle Review)

Was it a pep talk or a provocation? Allen’s response, in October, to the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” had elements of both.

The proffered “compact” marked a grim phase in the Trump administration’s dealings with elite universities. The letter from the U.S. Department of Education, sent to nine leading universities, offered a leg up in federal funding to universities willing to accept a broad range of conditions — including “abolishing institutional units” that “belittle” conservative ideas, defining “male” and “female” “according to reproductive function and biological processes,” and ensuring that foreign students “are introduced to, and supportive of, American and Western values.” Such demands left many on campus feeling a bleaker-than-usual sense of persecution. In one characteristic opinion essay, Lisa Fazio and Brendan Nyhan, professors at Vanderbilt University and Dartmouth College, respectively, called the deal a “devil’s bargain,” warning that “any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would give up its legal rights and forever be subservient to the whims of the government.”

Allen’s reply went against the prevailing mood. In an essay titled “Why I’m Excited About the White House’s Proposal for a Higher Ed Compact,” published on her Substack before appearing in these pages, she framed the compact as an opportunity for universities to work in concert to develop a package of higher-ed reforms. While urging university leaders to reject the compact as written, she insisted that universities needed “to talk to each other” to arrive at some deal that would address the sector’s problems. (Rules intended to prevent collusion on tuition, she told me, have hampered cross-institutional collaboration.)

“By allowing civic education to erode, by abandoning a commitment to pluralism that includes viewpoint diversity, and by failing to achieve approaches to admissions and credentialing that are broadly experienced as fair,” she wrote, “universities have failed to contribute as they might” to the health of American democracy.

In staking out this position, Allen was elaborating upon an essay she’d published some months before in The Atlantic. That essay proposed several concrete reforms through which universities might begin to establish “a new social contract” with the American people. Elite institutions, Allen argued, should move toward lottery admissions so that students who clear a certain merit threshold are selected by geographic or socioeconomic criteria. (In addition to fostering “cultural cohesion,” she told me, a lottery would curb the “meritocratic arrogance that is a feature of our current system.”) Selective universities, she suggested, should increase the size of their undergraduate-student bodies. They should experiment with three-year degrees as a way of controlling tuition costs. And they should support “viewpoint diversity” through faculty recruitment and perhaps by establishing two-year visiting professorships for scholars in right-leaning think tanks.

For decades, higher-ed policy has, via investments in STEM education, focused on national security and economic productivity. We have, Allen warned, neglected the university’s deeper purpose, which is the maintenance and fortification of civic strength.

To many observers of higher education, such ideas seem reasonable and overdue. Aspects of Allen’s agenda, however, might seem to align suspiciously well with emerging trends that many scholars view as noxious. In recent years, a spate of civics institutes and Great Books programs has arisen across the nation. Many of these programs are conspicuously conservative. Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican of Tennessee, announced a $6-million civics institute at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville as a way of fighting “anti-American thought”; the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education was conceived, by a shadowy nonprofit called the Council on Public University Reform, as a countermove against “cancel culture and uniformity of opinion on campus.” Tens of millions of dollars in grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, in January, went to support professorships in programs in civic leadership and Western civilization — programs some faculty regard as affirmative action for right-leaning scholars at a time when jobs in the humanities are punishingly scarce.

Allen believes, Ober told me, that the new civics institutes, even those mandated by legislators with an “ideological agenda,” could play a role in strengthening democracy. “Danielle is saying, let’s work and try to make them part of the solution rather than marginalizing them and saying they’re impure.” (Ober is a co-director of the Stanford Civics Initiative.)

While Allen singled out UT-Knoxville’s civics program for praise, she was cautiously measured in describing the curricular battles that have engulfed the humanities. “Some of the critiques that conservatives have made about college curricula are sound,” she told me. “We haven’t taught enough bread-and-butter basics of U.S. history, constitutionalism, and the like. Some of the critiques from Black studies, which require us to expand our horizon of what voices matter, are also sound.”

Is this fairmindedness simply — centrism? For some of Allen’s collaborators and admirers, the appeal of her higher-ed reformism lies in its promise to reorient academic discourse around the center. Paul Carrese, director of Arizona State University’s Center for American Civics, sees Allen’s project as “rebuilding a broad middle” in higher education. He hopes that Allen-style civic education might help alleviate the angry polarization that characterizes contemporary American political life. “More critical, radical views farther to the left, farther to the right — in a way, these views might be too prominent right now,” Carrese told me. “The focus should be on expanding the center and a healthy culture of Socratic dialogue across center-left and center-right.”

Music

“AGAINST THAT INCREDIBLE WEIGHT”:

Gillian Welch: This Land is Her Land (Jewly Hight, April 1, 2026, Bitter Southerner)

It pleases Welch when songs prove to be malleable in meaning. “I love that Dave and I kill ourselves working to make things just so,” she says, “and then we put them out there into the world and they can do anything and mean anything to anybody. That’s why we work so hard on them.” But there is one way of interpreting the spirit of their music that bothers her: “If someone were to think that our songs are maudlin or pessimistic, I would be shocked. Because I hear them as strong, quiet. I think if you really digest those narratives, there’s an incredible undercurrent of perseverance. When we’re singing those songs, we think the people are going to make it through.” Lange had a similar perspective on the people she photographed weathering the cruel deprivations of the Depression. “I many times encountered courage,” she told a Smithsonian archivist. “Real courage. Undeniable courage.”

There’s another point upon which Welch is insistent: she and Rawlings haven’t walled their material off in the past by depicting characters in the throes of displacement, hardship, and economic precarity. She throws out hypothetical questions: “Do people not still have children who die tragic early deaths? Of course they do. Do people not still take narcotics to try to ease the pain for a moment? Of course they do.” “One More Dollar,” her song about the inner turmoil of a migrant worker caught between the necessity of toiling for meager but essential pay and a longing to be back with the people they love, has powerful resonance at a time when when ICE raids — blatantly driven by racial profiling and often targeting businesses staffed by immigrants — have created life and death stakes nationwide.

Welch’s singing, initially squarely in the austere Appalachian tradition, has developed a miraculous blend of leanness and litheness over the years. Her recordings of “Dark Turn of Mind,” on 2011’s The Harrow & The Harvest, and “Here Stands a Woman,” on 2024’s Woodland, are fine examples; she applies her reedy instrument to supple slides, bluesy bends, and insinuating phrasing. What comes through in Welch’s vocals is a sense of bearing up beneath the weight of the world.

When I describe this quality, she confirms that she feels it too, and points to the influence of Jerry Garcia’s singing. Recently, she tried to turn a friend on to the Dead, and received a disappointing reaction. “They just sound really tired to me,” the friend commented dismissively. That left Welch feeling at least partially justified: “I said, ‘Well, yes, of course they’re tired. They’re touring musicians. They’re exhausted. But don’t you hear that [Garcia’s] constantly pushing up against that incredible weight?’”

So many folk and country songs pine for the idealized and unchanging old home place and the saintly, nurturing mother figure who waits there. But there’s an equally long tradition of ballads of the rambling, rootless, implicitly male troubadour. The Dead served as colorful embodiments of the latter role, and Nevins, Welch’s college buddy, could see her migrating toward it before she’d formally chosen music as her vocation.

Immigration

ALL FOOD IS AMERICAN FOOD:

The Decision That Would Create a Permanent American Underclass (Padma Lakshmi, 4/01/26, NY Times)

The principle predates the Constitution. Our colonial history brought the tradition over from the British, who recognized that birth on a nation’s soil carried citizenship. Later, after the shameful Dred Scott decision of 1857 denied citizenship to Black Americans, the nation fought a Civil War and corrected that injustice for all future Americans with the 14th Amendment. Designed to reflect America’s diverse identity, it codified birthright citizenship and placed citizenship beyond the whims of any one politician.

The law on birthright citizenship is clear, and a majority of Americans support it. But Mr. Trump refuses to accept limits on his ethnic gatekeeping and his attempts to bend the Constitution to his will. And he fails to recognize that birthright citizenship is American culture.

Our country’s cuisine shows it. I regularly work with chefs who blend their ancestral recipes with local staples to bring us meals that forge a culture for all of us. In the United States, we savor flavors from around the world precisely because birthright citizenship has been the law of the land for generations. I’ve visited the Nigerian American community in Houston, where the suya spice brought me back to the masala of my own childhood. I’ve eaten the cuisine of Cambodian refugees, as well as their children and grandchildren, in Lowell, Mass. And I’ve slurped delicious ceviche with Peruvian chefs in hipster Brooklyn.


America is interesting and strong because of the contributions of immigrants and their children, mixing with the ingredients of other cultures and evolving over time, creating both a blend of the world’s cuisines and our own unique food culture all at once.

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