In some classical journal — it may have been Mnemosyne — I recently ran across a review of a title guaranteed to confuse just about every non-classicist and some percentage of classicists, too: The Fragments of the Methodists, Volume I. If I’m not mistaken, these are fragmentary medical texts, and the Methodists are rivals of the Dogmatists and the Empiricists.

I just checked, and the only non-fragmentary Methodist is Soranus, a gynaecologist. With a name like that, he should have been a proctologist.

Betsy Newmark writes that Chief Justice John Roberts “now has the luxury of having complete job security for the rest of his life”. Not quite: he doesn’t seem likely to do anything justifying impeachment, and we can hope that he will be sensible enough to resign if he can no longer handle the job due to physical or mental frailty, but that still leaves one possibility for involuntary early retirement. At the rate the Democrats are going, I can see them in ten or fifteen years impeaching Roberts or another ‘conservative’ justice with no justification whatsoever except the desire to replace him with someone who will vote as they wish.