Is efficiency always a good thing? That depends partly on how one defines it. At Law and Liberty, Jeffrey Bristol argues that efficiency in record-keeping is not necessarily a good thing for the criminal justice system:

“Digital record-keeping increases the efficiency of criminal prosecution in three ways that can harm liberty. First, it reduces the amount of physical space required to maintain files, thereby increasing the ability to search them. Second, it increases records’ durability, resulting in greater permanence. Third, it makes records easier to communicate from place to place. When these three efficiencies combine, they remove the burdens of paperwork that incidentally protected rights.”

I am not entirely convinced, but give the whole thing a read. In other news, Bianca Bosker writes in praise of the supermarket: “Long-suffering as one of the thinnest-margined businesses in existence and one of the least-looked-forward-to places to visit, the supermarket has, for more than a decade, been under assault from e‑commerce giants, blamed for making Americans fat, accused of contributing to climate change, abandoned in favor of restaurants, and, in parts of the country, disappearing at a concerning pace. Esteem for the supermarket runs so low that, although Fairway technically is one, Howie bristled when I called it that. ‘I never liked us to be considered a supermarket,’ he told me. ‘We used to be, you know, a food store.’ Yet in recent months, the supermarket has assumed a new centrality in Americans’ lives.”

The novelist David Black remembers driving, drinking, and studying with the poet Archibald MacLeish: “MacLeish had been one of my two thesis advisors at Amherst College. He liked Amherst, though he found its students less sophisticated than his students at Harvard, where he taught from 1949 to 1962. This was 1966. In Conway, we met a few of his students. He lived in a comfortable farmhouse. Along the wall, next to the stairs leading down to his study hung photographs of the great men and women he had known, many of them friends. Writers, celebrities, politicians—no, not a lot of politicians; statesmen. The office was huge. I recall it as a booklined 90 feet. Maybe more, maybe less. A lot of the books had—he said—been research for his book-length poem Conquistador. To me, it looked a much nicer place to write than the cottage we had passed. The other students arrived. MacLeish led us down to a pond, where we swam and drank Virginia Gentleman, my first taste of bourbon. The label called the drink ‘The Aristocrat of Them All.’ My father, a union organizer who never drank, called my previous favorite drink—Wilson’s blended whiskey—‘The Workingman’s Whiskey.’ By my third glass of Virginia Gentleman, I had abandoned the workingman’s drink for the aristocrat’s drink. I felt like a class traitor.”

Dan Crowe and Matt Willey plan to launch a new magazine called Inque: “Inque will not be beholden to advertisers, because it won’t have any. Crowe and Willey, who previously launched Port and Avaunt together, wanted full creative control. They hope to raise funds for the first issue (about $200,000) with a Kickstarter campaign and be self-sustaining after that with a subscription service, plus sales from select vendors. They also plan to sell T-shirts, tote bags, and limited-edition art prints.”

Will James Cameron ever finish his promised Avatar sequels?

The poet of independence in an age of dogma: “In a masterful biography published last year, DePaul University professor Matthew W. Maguire uncovers the heterodox legacy of the French poet, an influential intellectual whose work has long been neglected by Anglophone scholarship. In a short life of 41 years, Péguy rose from the precarious working class of the industrial province of Orléans to the pinnacle of Parisian intellectual life. Right from the start, contradictory influences shaped his childhood. Raised by a single mother after the unexpected death of his father, Péguy grew up surrounded by misery, struggle, and vanishing hopes. His upbringing cemented his unstinting belief in working-class solidarity. But his education was also marked by the influence of the patriotic — if not borderline-nationalist — ideals of the Third Republic, as well as by the mystical appeal of Catholicism.”

Olivia de Havilland has died. She was 104. In The Atlantic, Todd S. Purdum writes about how she took on the studio system in Hollywood.

Photos: South Dakota