· Well written. Good content will make or break your blog. Period. This it the #1 thing that makes a blog successful in my book.
· Frequently updated. Unless you're a guru of some sort you really need to stay on top of it. This can be a real challenge.
· Consistent. This is kind of a combination of the first two. I like sites that are able to maintain quality and frequency overtime.
· Open. I like to read people who are honest and willing to talk about tough issues in a free and open way.
· Responsive. Those who respond to feedback and try to adapt to the wants and needs of their audience get high marks from me.
· Well designed. Yes, I do judge a blog by its design. It's not the most important thing, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't matter at all.
· Aware of its audience. If you don't know your audience it'll show.
· Varied in topic. I feel there are lots of people who would disagree with this, but I like sites that change the subject every once in awhile.
· Personal. I tend to enjoy a blog with a bit of a personality. I want to"get to know", to a certain degree, the person(s) behind the site. Tone and style have a lot to do with this.
· Thick skinned. With any successful site comes nay-sayers, trolls, pedants and spammers.
· Honest. Readers are smart and they can smell bullshit.
· Accountable. Mistakes are inevitable and there are times when it's best to fess up and admit where you're wrong.
· Funny. I like a blog that can make me laugh on occasion.

NYTimes guest columnist Dahlia Lithwick is arguing that the"activist judge" label deserves an equally withering counter, something that can be bandied about when judges are activist in reactionary ways (which is at least as common). Her nomination:"re-activist":

Re-activist judges are the ones trying to roll back time to the 19th century. Re-activists are the judges who have reactivated federalism by rediscovering the"dignity" of states. ... Re-activist judges have increasingly adopted the view that their personal religious convictions somehow obviate the constitutional divide between church and state. ... Re-activist judges are able to present themselves as"strict constructionists" or"originalists" by arguing, as does Justice Clarence Thomas, that any case decided wrongly (i.e., not in accordance with the framers of the Constitution) should simply be erased, as though erasure is somehow a passive act. And while there is an urgent normative debate underlying this issue - over whether the Constitution should evolve or stay static - no one ought to be allowed to claim that the act of clubbing a live Constitution to death isn't activism.

While I applaud her attempt to highlight the hidden activism of" conservative" judicators and challenge the"judicial activism" meme, the moderate in me wonders why the middle ground -- the vast majority of judges at all levels doing their best to apply enduring and slowly changing legal doctrines to swiftly shifting gray areas of contemporary life -- gets so little attention.

Or perhaps the problem is a perceptual and rhetorical one, caused by the very real diversity of political thought and theory in America, and the increasingly powerful tendency to demonize the opposition(s). Depending on what camp you belong to, 'smart' judges are the ones that agree with you, and 'activist' judges are the ones that don't? No, I don't think it's that simple, though sometimes the rhetoric does seem to fall that way.

Perhaps we've really come to a point where we are getting at the heart of the matter, a nexus where issues of federalism, rights, religion, legitimacy, identity, security need to be addressed in fundamental ways. The last time we did this was in the 50s and 60s, I think, so perhaps we really are due. Then, when we work these questions out, we can come together again in a reasonably coherent manner and go on for another few decades, pushing the limits and exploring the gray areas of our new paradigm. Maybe, though, I'm being overly optimistic to think that this Supreme Court can actually resolve some of these questions without exacerbating them.

Follow-up: Brandon, at Siris, thinks I may be underestimating the degree to which the judiciary has, due to a lack of checks on its authority,"precedent by precedent, slowly moved or begun to move outside its Constitutional bounds, and that therefore the problem is systemic." The Canadian Constitution, he points out, has a clause, enacted in 1982 (Clause 32), allowing the legislature to check the judiciary.

For 36 hours or so after Governor McGreevey announced his resignation, it appeared as if the Torch might be eclipsed on the New Jersey list of scandals. Think again. Today's New York Times has a brilliantly researched article on the McGreevey resignation, that concludes with the following nugget:

Then, a few minutes before 4 p.m., came a stunning development. Mr. Lesniak [McGreevey's attorney] received a call from a lawyer who said he was an intermediary working on behalf of Mr. Cipel and Mr. Lowy and wanted to cut a deal. Mr. Lesniak declined to discuss the matter because it was now under investigation by the F.B.I. But according to several people, the lawyer offered to drop the lawsuit in exchange for a cash settlement and the Governor's agreement to approve permits for Tuoro College, a school in Brooklyn, that was trying to found a medical school in New Jersey.

Take one guess which former New Jersey senator's lobbying firm has been working on Tuoro's behalf to obtain the medical school permit.

If true, the Tuoro offer provides an answer to the biggest unanswered question of this matter, which is why McGreevey's former lover, Golan Cipel, decided to go public. Maybe, of course, he's telling the truth: but most sexual harrassment cases lead to the victim suffering retaliation, not being constantly rewarded. Maybe, as McGreevey's lawyers have suggested, Cipel was trying to extort money. Or maybe, as McGreevey's 2001 opponent, Bret Schundler, alleged almost immediately after the resignation, Cipel was used by influential New Jersey Democrats pursuing their own agenda.

Obviously we'll learn more in the coming days. But it's nice to see that The Torch hasn't developed a conscience in his political retirement.

Geitner Simmons calls attention to two posts at Regions of Mind about how the Pulitzer Prize winning Polish novelist, Henry Sienkiewitz, was influenced by his travels in the American West; and a third about how the United States accommodated Louisiana's Spanish and French heritage. Simmons especially calls attention to the responses by Nathanael at Rhine River, who wrote about the influence of Sienkiewitz on modern literature; and compared the United States's assimilation of Louisiana to the contemporary Prussian annexation of the Rhineland. As Simmons said, these are important indicators of the kind of immediate intellectual exchange that blogging enables. We both recommend Rhine River as a fascinating history site, with strong visual appeal.

Siris, which we've just added to the blogroll at Cliopatria, actually has rules for what is blogrolled over there. The discriminating philosopher says:"Political blogging is the parasitic scum of the blogosphere." I was just bottom-feeding, when I recommended Dugger's article, but I meant it!

Thanks be to all goodness, NaomiChana has breathed life back into Baraita.

Finally, Brian Ulrich observes that"... you know you're a grad student in history when you set your books down to check out and a visible cloud of dust emerges from one of them." He reminds me of the professor of European intellectual history who spoke of our job-related injuries. He was working quietly one day in his library carrel, when a bound volume of the London Times fell on his head. Maybe you have to have seen what a bound volume of the London Times looks like to appreciate that one.

As an Asianist, teaching world history can be very frustrating. Most world history textbooks are written by Western historians, mostly the same Europeanists who write the Western Civ texts, but they usually add an Asianist to the group, usually a China or India person. Sometimes they get it right, but a lot of the time you can tell that the Asia chapters were written by someone who picked up one or two basic textbooks. You can sometimes even tell which textbook (I love Mikiso Hane's work, but it has to be read in context!), and they're often out-of-date (Asia textbooks don't get the kind of semi-annual polishing now current in the trade, and there are some really creaky old classics still being used by thousands of people; that's a subject for another post).

So I spend a fair bit of time in class correcting and contextualizing the textbook material. Maybe the experience is the same for Europeanists, or Americanists? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that material is much better served by the distillation process than the Asian material.

The worst, the most consistently annoying thing, though, is Marco Polo. Let me say this clearly and plainly: Marco Polo did not go to China, Marco Polo did not work for the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. Yes, it was possible to make the journey, and yes, some non-Chinese did serve the Yuan. But the errors in his Travels cannot be glossed over as"a traveler's tendency to exaggerate (especially in regard to numbers)" and his absence from Yuan records (which were pretty well kept) cannot be slipped by with"may have been employed" and the distinct likelihood that Polo was simply embellishing translations of Chinese gazetteers he picked up in Persia is not clearly expressed by"Scholars have long regarded Marco Polo's book, if used carefully, as an important historical document."

Marco Polo's book is important because it introduced Europeans to a world beyond their ken, and it seems to have been based on authentic sources, but badly translated (particularly in terms of units of measure), possibly through several stages of translation. This is commonly accepted by actual Asianists. But, outside of world history texts written by generalists, I've never seen a history of Asia that took Marco Polo's narrative at face value. It's time to bring these things up to date.

Supplement: Some Details

Ok, perhaps it was unfair, certainly unrealistic, to think that I was going to get away without some more specifics. The one book which keeps coming up when I look for sources is Frances Wood'sDid Marco Polo Go To China? though it has gotten some pretty harsh reviews for relying heavily on 'sins of omission' rather than positive errors, but Wood also makes some powerful positive claims particularly in the area of identifying the Persian and Arab sources from which Polo's narrative was almost certainly constructed.

Some of her noted omissions are worth mentioning, though, particularly foot-binding. Wood's critics have noted that Polo supposedly spent most of his time with Mongols and other non-Chinese, but the Mongols were well aware of the Chinese tradition, increasingly popular at this time, and legislated against it (for Mongol women). Even if Polo had no contact with Chinese women (and some variants of Polo's text do mention their taking"small steps" he should, over 17 years of administrative service, have come across mention of it. Similarly, chopsticks are something that he might well have noticed in the marketplaces and shops, even if he didn't spend time with Chinese in their homes.

Peter Jackson's article"Marco Polo and his 'Travels'" (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 61, No. 1. [1998], pp. 82-101 [JSTOR]) argues that Polo's journey was probably authentic (and his omissions are due to his spending most of his time in the Indian Ocean, plus the vagaries of pre-printing copyists), but that he exaggerated their status (which wasn't uncommon, for Europeans far from home, he argues). This would account for Polo's use of secondary sources to describe much of China, and might help explain the total lack of corroborating documentation for his Asian sojourns.

This would not, however, account for Polo's lack of Mongol or Chinese linguistic skills. Nor would it account for his geographical absurdities. Some of them can be attributed to his lack of understanding of Chinese units: the Chinese li, for example, is translated by Polo to mean a mile, when it actually corresponds to about 1/3 of that distance. (This has always bothered me, since I noticed it in a World Civ reader: how could he have done business in a society in which he didn't actually understand the units of trade and measure?) Not all, though, as he gets travel times wrong as well, for trips that he supposedly took himself.

There's an interesting contradiction, by the way, regarding ibn Battuta, the other noted world traveler. Gernet's textbook says that"Unlike Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta was an excellent observer...." (375) while Jackson contrasts Polo's realism"with the highly improbable description given of China in the 1340s by the Moroccan pilgrim Ibn Battuta (demonstrably an authentic traveller as far as India)." (89) Ross Dunn, the reigning expert, comes down somewhere in the middle.

The section which is almost always present in the readers is the description of Hangzhou. It reads much like a Chinese gazeteer or a government report, and is probably a pretty decent description of the city, though exaggerated in numbers and measures. It's the introduction to the material that irks me.

Bennett notes the possible dangers inherent in a tied Electoral College (269-269), which would throw the election into the House. To preempt the possibility, he urges expanding the membership of the House by one member, to 436, thereby producing an E.C. of 539 members (with D.C.'s 3 votes) and ensuring that, at least in a case where all electors cast ballots, there could be no tie.

Bennett's proposal, however, would create a far more likely problem than a deadlocked Electoral College: a House in which both parties had the same number of Members. We're not that far removed from a House in which neither party had a majority--the 64th Congress (1917-1918)--and in which third-party Members decided which party would have the Speakership. (The mostly left-wing independents from the Upper Midwest sided with the Dems.) If I had to guess, a tied House is much more likely than a tied E.C. Better to keep the system the way it is, or abolish the E.C. altogether.

Yet before anyone reserves a bottle of champagne against the day, British historian Karen Armstrong warns that we may have been fighting for the wrong side or at least for a cause we never fully understood. In their own perverted way, Armstrong argues, the Al Qaeda have been fighting to assert the existence of God in world that has forgotten Him.

So what is fundamentalism? Fundamentalism represents a kind of revolt or rebellion against the secular hegemony of the modern world. Fundamentalists typically want to see God, or religion, reflected more centrally in public life. They want to drag religion from the sidelines, to which it's been relegated in a secular culture, and back to center stage.

If so, the victory discernable as a thin line on the horizon really represents the final triumph of secularism over the last religion. And, while Armstrong has publicly said many foolish things, this particular accusation at least deserves serious examination, not in the least because other writers, like Sam Harris affirm it from an opposite point of view. The Amazon review of Harris' book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason summarizes his thesis as follows:

Harris offers a vivid historical tour of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are used to justify harmful behavior and sometimes heinous crimes. He asserts that in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer tolerate views that pit one true god against another. Most controversially, he argues that we cannot afford moderate lip service to religion—an accommodation that only blinds us to the real perils of fundamentalism.

Harris claims that if we seriously subscribe to God in any form we will eventually wind up settling accounts with WMDs; hence we must abolish God. Armstrong asserts that unless we accept all gods, any religion left out will eventually resort to weapons of mass destruction."Now more and more small groups will have the capability of destruction that were formerly the prerogative of the nation-state ... The way we're going -- and Britain is just as culpable as the United States -- we're alienating Muslims who were initially horrified by Sept. 11 and we're strengthening al-Qaeda, which has definitely been strengthened by the Iraq war and its awful aftermath." She argues that we should simply recognize that many people"just want to be more religious in some way or another."

The cure to religious extremism, according to these arguments, is a choice of two elixirs: believing in nothing particular or classifying all religious belief as madness. Yet on closer examination both these arguments are so close to each other that despite apparent differences they are virtually identical. Both require the abolition of belief as the price of survival, the latter by maintaining there is nothing worth arguing over and the former asserting there is nothing to argue about.

That will be good news to those who feel that the Global War on Terror is really about making the world safe for homosexuals, metrosexuals, MTV and the United Nations: that it is really about using the US Armed Forces to impose the"End of History" on 8th century holdouts; that its function is to restart the music that inconveniently stopped on September 11. But there is another possibility: that fundamentalism is created by the very vacuity Karen Armstrong recommends. Camus in The Rebel believed that man could find the courage to live under a dark heaven swept clean of stars. But then he was Camus: he uncharacteristically forgot that in that vast night false beacons would almost instantly spring up, the sort that Vladimir Ilich Lenin, anticipating Sam Harris, lit to the destruction of millions. In one thing Armstrong is almost certainly correct: Islamic fundamentalism is twinned to relativism of the West. In one thing she is almost certainly wrong: that its antidote is even more relativism.

It would be absurd to conclude that the war on terror is waged to make the world safe for nihilism. That would almost equal Robert Fisk's declaration, upon being beaten by a Muslim mob that"if I had been them, I would have attacked me." For where the mind can find no purchase it must ground its postulates in the simplest of things.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We fight in the end not to disbelieve but for the right to believe again -- and trust that we may find our way.