This World and Me

One sunny day in 2018, I was walking home from class at UC Berkeley when I received a notification on my phone that almost made me trip on the sidewalk in surprise: it was a news article announcing that a federal judge had decided that the entirety of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (often shortened to just "the Affordable Care Act" or "ACA" or "Obamacare") was unconstitutional. How could this have happened? The Supreme Court of the United States had previously upheld the constitutionality of the ACA in 2012 in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius , 567 U.S. 519 (often abbreviated to NFIB ), so it was unthinkable to me that some federal district judge six years later could decide otherwise. I was wrong. The Affordable Care Act is a complex piece of legislation that includes a plethora of different healthcare reforms. In my view, there are three key elements of the Act: Firstly, it required individual insuran...

At 6:00 pm CST on February 11, 2021, a man named Willie Smith was scheduled to be executed by the state of Alabama for the 1991 murder of Sharma Ruth Johnson. Less than 24 hours before this time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ordered the state of Alabama not to execute Smith "unless it allows Smith’s outside spiritual advisor, Pastor Robert Paul Wiley, Jr., into the execution chamber". Citing "security reasons", the state of Alabama refuses to allow any non-prison staff in the execution chamber and has stated that it will not execute Smith because of the Eleventh Circuit's order. On the morning of February 11, Alabama filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court of the United States, asking it to vacate the Eleventh Circuit's injunction of execution immediately so that the execution may proceed as originally planned. A few hours later, the Court denied the application , and Smith was not executed . This case, called Dunn v. Smi...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020) The evening of Friday, September 18, 2020, began normally. I attended my virtual class on the history of German literature and had just finished dinner when my phone vibrated, indicating a new message from a friend. It was one of my roommates, who had just sent the following message to a group chat: "Wtf". For a moment, there was an air of confusion; my roommate wasn't sure if what he had just read on the Internet was accurate, and none of us were sure what he was talking about. Then, a few seconds later, the fog of doubt cleared away as my roommate sent three small yet devastating words: "RBG passed away". In her eulogy of a late colleague , Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recounted how Justice Antonin Scalia was once asked how he and Ginsburg could be friends, given their nearly diametrical opposite opinions on the law. Scalia had answered: "I attack ideas. I don’t attack people." Her remarkable friendships with even those...

If there is anything that the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, it is that we depend on reliable, high-speed access to the Internet as an essential utility to our lives, not unlike electricity and water. But even as millions of Americans have been forced to work from home or study from home, there are still millions of Americans who lack reliable access to the Internet, particularly in rural areas. The problem has been difficult to quantify because different studies have employed different measurement tactics, some of which are rather questionable. According to Ars Technica , a study conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) indicated that "21.3 million Americans live in areas without access to fixed broadband with 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds". However, this is widely considered to be a gross underestimation because the FCC "counts an entire census block as served even if only one home in the census block can get service". Ars Technica re...

Several hundred years ago, writing was rare. Given the high cost of printing, as well as the cost of even learning how to read and write, only privileged members of society were literate. This gave rise to an interesting cultural difference: when a person issues an authoritative order, it meant a great deal more when the order was delivered in writing , as opposed to being delivered through speech. Mere speech was transient, and in any case, the recipient of the order could deny that it was ever delivered. On the other hand, a written order—also known as a writ —was much more difficult to deny, as it carried with it a permanence and air of high authority. In the old Kingdom of England, there was a special class of writs reserved to high authorities (usually one of the King's courts), and some of these writs have continued to be promulgated today in countries beyond England, including the United States. In fact, you may have heard of at least some of them. They are the six prerogat...

Back in August 2018, I wrote a post called " Secret messages ". In that post, I discussed how in elementary school my friends and I devised a rudimentary "secret language" to send coded messages to each other without our enemies knowing what we were writing. I then discussed a little bit of modern cryptography (which I described as "the scientific study of sending secret messages"), specifically the RSA encryption scheme . This post is a bit of a follow-up to that post. With today's technology, it is quite easy to send someone a secret message that not only can be read only by the intended recipient, but also allows the intended recipient to verify that the message was not modified by an eavesdropper or "man-in-the-middle". It happens everyday on the Internet: see the part of this blog's URL that says " https ". That 's' there is extremely important. It means that you can trust that this blog post was delivered to you by...

Members of Congress, I have the high privilege and the distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the United States. This is the customary introduction said by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives at the beginning of the president's annual State of the Union message to Congress. The tradition goes back several presidencies and has occurred regardless of party alignment. In the 2007 State of the Union address (skip to 12:25 in the linked video), Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat (who is the current speaker as of February 2020), introduced President George W. Bush, a Republican, with these words, and Bush famously responded by saying (and followed with unanimous standing ovation), "Tonight, I have the high privilege and distinct honor of my own, as the first president to begin the State of the Union message with these words: Madame Speaker." Traditionally, the applause and standing ovation that follows this introduction is performed out of respect ...