In 2010, when Julia Louis-Dreyfus saw the reveal of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she soon discovered there was a typo in her name. The mistake? The star read "Luis" instead of "Louis" and there was no hyphen between Louis and Dreyfus. Julia took it all in stride, saying, "The misspelling was so perfectly apt, a great metaphor for show business," Louis-Dreyfus said. "Right when you think you've made it, you get knocked down... It's an ideal metaphor for how this business works." #Seinfeld
I went to law school with a guy that I once respected. Thought he was a nice enough guy, and we hung out in similar social circles.
After we graduated, I opened my firm, and he went to work at the prosecutor’s office. He got stuck on the traffic docket.
I’d been told by a few friends who did traffic defense work that he had kinda turned into an old grouch during his time in this role— unwilling to make deals, and even going above “office standards” (ie being harsher than the prosecutor’s internal procedures required him to be).
A few months later, one of our mutual friends had a birthday party, which this guy and I each attended. We got to talking about our respective practices, and he mentioned taking enjoyment in having the harsh reputation.
Being the anti-government-lawyer guy that I am, I not-so-nicely said that I couldn’t imagine taking joy in treating normal people poorly for things like speeding tickets. He defended himself by mentioning a story similar to the video below. An older woman was racing her adult son to the hospital. It wasn’t anything life-threatening in the end, but it was something that a reasonable person would call an emergency (the son passed out, had incoherent speech, etc.). The prosecutor said that he let the woman off easy by giving a deferral program (basically, court fees + drivers ed class) for the speeding citation she received. Yep, she was stopped while rushing her son to the hospital; explained this story to the police; still given a traffic citation; and the prosecutor’s “good” deal, was making her pay court fees and do a useless driver’s ed course.
I laughed and said I got less for drag racing when I was in high school, and my excuse was that I was an idiot kid in a sports car, not that I was rushing my kid to the hospital.
Law enforcement— from cops to prosecutors— are ill-trained at factoring in the “human” side of circumstances with which they have to deal. It results in greater danger to innocent parties (like the kid in the video below). And it results in some really, really unfair treatment for good people (like the woman in the story I just mentioned).
It is a fundamental flaw in our system which plays out daily. Good prosecutors and police officers prevent the horror stories— or even the distasteful stories. Bad cops and bad prosecutors just mess everything up, and aren’t worth the weight of the paperwork they fill out.
Rolling Stone magazine named "LUX", by ROSALÍA, the 3rd best album of 2025:
“ROSALÍA has proven to be pop’s most provocative chaos agent, and LUX sounds like absolutely nothing else in music right now. Her irreverence is what makes the album such a shock to the system — she draws from the great masters, but takes aim at Mozart with the energy of a baddie, and at Bach with a cigarette in her mouth. In the end, the album triumphs because every song is deeply considered and intensely sincere, evoking complex ideas about what, after all, we are all doing here.
She confronts pain and loss, anger and grief, sex and desire, love and devotion, while trying to better understand who she is, the way she loves, and the spiritual forces that move her.”