The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jennifer:

Alas, he's a pretty normal business book writer. They tend to mangle English. I have the book, haven't read it yet, but am not at all surprised by how badly Taibbi says he mixes his metaphors. I'm reading the book for near-term optimistic futurism, hopefully some good stories from various parts of the world, and that's about it. Fluent prose would be a charming surprise; its absence is merely expected.

I also bought the book because he was a guest on the Daily Show and I'd like more publishers to send their authors there. Next for this treatment is "No god but God" by Reza Aslan, who was on last night and is said to be a really good writer (and even more fabulous by comparison). He says, "I just told a story, a narrative about the evolution of faith and process in Islam." Also "I consider myself a novelist but I don’t get worked up by silly genres. In my mind there are two types of writing: good writing and bad writing."

Madeleine, ownership of one's body and the parts thereof is actually a very weird legal question. See, for example, Moore v. Regents of the University of California, where Moore was convinced to have a splenectomy, after which doctors at the Medical Center of UCLA performed research on it and other samples taken at his visits. They patented a cell line derived from his cells and licensed it commercially. Moore was upset when he found out they were profiting by hundreds of thousands of dollars from "his" cells, and sued. The courts ended up wanting to throw the property question back to the legislature, and one judge objected particularly to the idea of "a right to sell one's own body tissue for profit." (This is from my boyfriend's property casebook, by Dukeminier and Krier, if anyone cares.)

There have also been a couple cases about property rights in sperm like this current one.

So what "owning your own body" means and what rights you then have (right to sell a kidney for medical research? right to sell a kidney for transplant? right to have an abortion? right to clone yourself?) are still poorly-defined legally.

As for Chris Shays, he's already under watch for publicly denouncing the DeLay ethics rule changes earlier this year. Here's one of the early posts about the issue by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. Marshall later named all the members who said they opposed the rule change the Shays Handful. Keep in mind that Shays is from Connecticut, so appearing unhandcuffed to his party's leadership may be a good thing electorally.

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