Mark D. White

So much for monthly updates, ha.

To make a long story short, for the last three months I've been spending most of my time working on a book and managing quite a bit of change at school—both of which I hope to talk about soon—as well as giving invited talks, which I enjoyed. Because of those and other assorted things that can be lumped under the heading "life," I don't have much to show for the time since my last update.

In terms of academic work:

• I signed contracts for both Economics and the Virtues, which I'm co-editing with Jennifer A. Baker for Oxford University Press, and The Illusion of Well-Being, the follow-up to The Manipulation of Choice, which I'm writing for Palgrave. I also had to shuffle some things around; my book-in-progress on law and social economics will now be completed early next year after I finish my current project this summer and The Illusion of Well-Being by the end of the year.
• UPDATED: I contributed a piece on libertarian paternalism and nudges for the Canadian public policy journal Public Options, which should be out any day; I'll update this post with a link when it's online. here's the link.
• I wrote several blog posts for Economics and Ethics: "On Mark Bittman, the soda ban, and 'making people think twice' about their decisions" (March 20), "Response to Sarah Conly's defense of paternalism in The New York Times" (March 25), and "David Brooks on same-sex marriage, freedom, and individualism in The New York Times" (April 2).
• I wrote two book reviews: one on Law, Virtue and Justice, edited by Amalia Amaya and Hock Lai Ho, for LSE Review of Books, and the other on From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities: An Evolutionary Economics without Homo economicus, by Geoffrey Hodgson, for Journal of Bioeconomics (in press).
• I was pleased to learn that my article "A Kantian Critique of Neoclassical Law and Economics," published in Review of Political Economy in 2006, will be reprinted in Efficiency in Law and Economics, edited by Richard O. Zerbe Jr. for the Economic Approaches to Law series at Edward Elgar Publishing.

In terms of popular writing and blogs:

• I posted several times for my Psychology Today blog: "What's Wrong with Paternalism and the 'Nanny State'" (March 25), "Self-Loathers, Appreciation, and Taking Love for Granted" (April 14), and "Should We Be So Excited about Lybrido (and Viagra)?" (May 29).
• I wrote a piece on Superman and moral judgment for The Big Issue in the UK. (The full article is not online, it seems.)
• I had two posts at The Comics Professor: "A heartwarming scene of acceptance in FF #6" (April 29) and "Grant Morrison tells a story of Nazi Superman—and so does Superman and Philosophy!" (May 10).
• Finally, I contributed a new piece to The Good Men Project, "How Do Men Think About Sex?" (April 24) in response to Sarah Bernstein's article in The Wall Street Journal, "How Often Should Married Couples Have Sex?"

I leave this afternoon for the Law and Society Association meetings in Boston; after I return, the summer push starts, and I'm hoping for a very productive three months, including a return to more regular blogging. (If nothing else, I have to have something to report here more often!)