Culture Briefs

**FILE** In this photo from Jan. 6, 2010, singer Carrie Underwood poses backstage at the People’s Choice Awards in Los Angeles. (Associated Press)

Story Topics

• Human Interest Story
• Entertainment_Culture
• ABC
• Carrie Underwood
• Martina Mcbride

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Selective edits

“The second item left on the ABC cutting room floor that America did not see last night was one of the most memorable moments of the entire week at the CMA Music Fest. Carrie Underwood … hasn’t hidden her Christian beliefs dating back to her days on American Idol in 2005. … Underwood took her ‘Jesus, Take The Wheel’ hit and morphed it into the gospel anthem ‘How Great Thou Art.’ …

“I was far from the only one in the 60,000 person crowd who had tears streaming from my eyes. When she was finished, the crowd roared to a decibel level not heard for the rest of the week — with the possible exception of another religious-themed song belted out by Martina McBride (also not shown by ABC). It is a shame that the ABC audience missed the most memorable performance of the CMA Music Fest, while the network instead chose to find time to showcase pop-pixie Taylor Swift in a day-in-the-life segment. …

“ABC, like most of Hollywood, actively and aggressively demotes the importance of Christianity — and God — in American society and pop culture. … It is a shame that the producers at ABC probably looked at each other, rolled their eyes, and shook their heads “no” when they saw the Underwood performance. … I knew immediately when I witnessed these two moments “live” in Nashville in June that ABC would do their best to ignore or edit them out of the September 1st broadcast.”

— Bruce Carroll, writing on “Revealing: What ABC Didn’t Show You From the CMA Country Music Fest,” on Sept. 2 at the Andrew Breitbart site Big Hollywood

Must blog?

“Orin Kerr reports: ‘On August 19th, Justice Kennedy … was talking about how law review case comments generally come out too late to be of use to the Court. … “I’ve found, what my clerks do now, when they have interesting cases — They read blogs.”’

“This means that the lawprofs who keep up high-profile blogs have disproportionate influence. You have traditional lawprofs laboring over law review articles, but these articles come out too late to discuss a case that’s pending in the Supreme Court. One answer — I’m not the first to say this — is that law review articles should properly be about something other than the latest pending or just-decided cases, something more timeless and profound. But I think that most law professors would like to be involved in the legal developments of the day. It must be irritating to see that the lawprof bloggers have a special line to the Court.

“This may stir up an old question that I know nags at some law professors: Will I be required to blog? Very soon after I started blogging, I heard the question ‘is it acceptable for lawprofs to blog?’ and then, right after that, the question ‘will I be required to blog?’ jumped up.”

— Ann Althouse, writing on “Do blogging lawprofs wield too much power?” on Sept. 4 at her personal site Althouse

Man and animals

“Well, one of the reasons Katherine Grier, who wrote probably the best history of pets in America, said that pet keeping really took off among the middle class between the 1800s and early 1900s was because it was a movement to make children better people. That raising a dog or a cat in your family if you were a kid was actually a way to learn nurturing skills and responsibility and all this stuff. I think there’s some truth to that. I think there’s no doubt about bringing animals into prisons, that bringing animals into retirement homes increases morale and my guess is that for some people it’s a real transformative experience.

“But I have a section in the book where I talk about whether pets are good for people. And I think they’ve been sort of overrated as being good for people. Some studies have found they are, and some studies have shown that they’re not particularly good for people; there’s been kind of a mixed bag. … There’s a number of people that are bitten by pets every year. There’s a shocking number of people that trip over their pet and wind up in the hospital. There’s the fact that pets are the biggest source of conflict between neighbors.”

— Hal Herzog, as interviewed in “Our conflicted relationship with animals” on Sept. 5 at Salon