BLOGGER SPOTLIGHT: Mark Kleiman

Today the Blogometer talks to Mark Kleiman, a Professor of Public Policy at the UCLA School of Public Affairs and a blogger at The Reality-Based Community.

(If you're looking for Friday's edition of Blogometer, click here).

Where did you grow up?
Jewish Baltimore; probably 90% of the people who lived within a mile were Jewish. A very, very odd place. I hated it.

Where do you live now?
Los Angeles, where (I discovered after I moved here) my father had always dreamed of living. A very, very odd place. I love it.

If you have an occupation other than blogging, what is it?
Teaching.

What's on your iPod right now?
What's an iPod? Is that connected to the Interwebs? And have I mentioned how much I hate .mp3s? My idea of music is a Byrd motet, but if you heard one as an .mp3 you'd never guess why.

What book do you think every person should read?
Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations, especially the essays "On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance" and "Toward a Rational Theory of Tradition."

Please finish this sentence: "When I'm not blogging, you'll probably find me..."
reading, teaching, or hiking.

What has been your favorite blog post, or your favorite story to write about?
I've had a good time making fun of the religious fanatics and the anti-religious fanatics.

Which blogger(s) do you consider indispensable, if any?
The usual suspects: [Kevin] Drum, [Matthew] Yglesias, [Nate] Silver, [Ezra] Klein, Hilzoy, [J. Bradford] DeLong, [Andrew] Sullivan, [Marc] Ambinder, [Megan] McArdle, [John] Cole, the Volokh Conspiracy. TPM, though that's really a newspaper rather than a blog.

Who's your favorite non-liberal blogger?
Eugene Volokh, Orin Kerr, Megan McArdle. John Cole was one of my favorite non-liberals until he saw the light.

Who's your favorite active politician?
Barack Obama. And I would have said the same thing in the summer of 2007. He's a once-in-a-generation figure.

Least favorite?
How long do you have? Rudy Giuliani would be high on the list.

What would you realistically like to see Democrats accomplish in 2009?
Health care, restricting greenhouse-gas emissions, leveling the playing field for union organizing.

If you could give President Obama advice, what would it be?
That we could have half as much crime and half as many people in prison ten years from now as we have today, and that he could lead the way. I'd probably just send him the manuscript of my forthcoming book, When Brute Force Fails.

As to political advice, mostly I wouldn't; Obama, as advised by [David] Plouffe and [David] Axelrod, is much smarter about politics than I am. But it's possible that they haven't quite grasped the potential for mobilizing what Don Price called "the scientific estate" (which for these purposes includes the humanities professoriat) as a political force.

What keeps you up at night?
Other than indigestion? The fact that California, which doesn't have a working government or adequate public schools, in a generation won't have a great public university system either.

Feel free to ask and answer your own question.
What's your next crusade?
Reforming the human-subjects-protection system so that Institutional Review Boards no longer threaten the freedom of inquiry.