Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has appeared on 60 Minutes, in an interview with Steve Kroft, on the eve of the publication of his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir.

Here are a few excerpts of the interview which remind us that there is a vast difference between a public perception of an individual and the individual himself, something which Justice Thomas has experienced and discusses with candor. Regarding how he is viewed, he says:

“It’s fascinating that people, there’s so many people now who will make judgments based on what you look like,” Thomas says. “I’m black. So I’m supposed to think a certain way. I’m supposed to have certain opinions. I don’t do that. You don’t create a box and put people in and then make a lot of generalizations about them.”

The justice agrees that there are some misconceptions about him, but says, “I think there are misconceptions about all of us.”

“There’s been an effort over the last 15, 20 years to create this perception of me. And you can’t argue that that’s been, in large part, successful,” Thomas says.

He is often dismissed as a man of little accomplishment, an opportunistic black conservative who sold out his race, joined the Republican Party and was ultimately rewarded with an affirmative action appointment to the nation’s highest court, a sullen, intellectual lightweight so insecure he rarely opens his mouth in oral arguments. The problem with the characterization is that it’s unfair and untrue.

“These conceptions or misperceptions, you call them, have accumulated because you haven’t really addressed them. You haven’t talked about them,” Kroft remarks.

“My job is to write opinions. I decide cases and write opinions. It is not to respond to idiocy and critics who make statements that are unfounded,” Thomas says. “That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have constructive criticisms, but it should be constructive. Whether or not I’m black or not, that’s just silliness. That is not worth responding to.”

Of the grandfather, who shaped and influence his life, he says:

“My mother packed our bags, told us we were to our grandparents’ house a few blocks away,” he remembers.

When he got to the front door he was met by his grandfather, Myers Anderson, a barely literate but frugal and industrious man who owned a truck and eked out a modest existence delivering fuel oil and firewood. He was a towering presence, who still looms over Thomas’s life.

“Do you remember the first things your grandfather said to you?” Kroft asks.

“He said the damn vacation is over,” Thomas recalls. “And he meant it. And there would be rules and regulations.”

“Some of the rules were that my grandmother was always right. That meant him too,” Thomas remembers. “And he would say, ‘Old Man Can’t is dead. I helped bury him.’ I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that. He felt very, very strongly that nothing was impossible.”

Thomas says his grandfather was the greatest man he ever met, and in tribute named his memoir “My Grandfather’s Son.” But he didn’t necessarily think so when he was growing up. His life was consumed by endless chores and regular duty on his grandfather’s delivery truck. Summer vacations were spent working a plot of land that had been deeded to his ancestors after the Civil War, just across the road from the plantation where they had worked as slaves. He and his brother helped build a house, cleared land, picked crops and learned under his grandfather’s tutelage that blisters turn to calluses and plantings into harvests.

Curious readers and viewers want to know what he has to say about Anita Hill, his former employee at the EEOC, in the aftermath, years later of the Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings in which she accused him of sexual harassment.

Asked if the Anita Hill that testified was the same Anita Hill he knew at the EEOC, Thomas says, “She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed. That’s not the person I knew. ”

“Who’s the person you knew?” Kroft asks.

“Well, I think she could defend herself. Let’s just put it that way. And she did not take slights very kindly. And anyone who did anything, she responded very quickly,” Thomas says.

“Didn’t take ten years?” Kroft asks.

“It didn’t take ten minutes,” Thomas says.

In the book, he remembers her as an average employee whose behavior could sometimes be irritating, rude, and unprofessional, which he attributed to her youth. He was asked to write a number of recommendations for her and helped advance her career, and speculates that she was swept up in events and succumbed to a combination of ego, ambition and immaturity.

Regarding his own testimony at the hearings:

“This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace,” he said during the hearing. “It is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

“Why did you use that language? Why a high tech lynching?” Kroft asks.

“If someone just wantonly tries to destroy you, if somebody comes in and drags you out of your house and beats the hell out of you. What is it?” the justice replies.

“What do you want people to think about these allegations? What is important…,” Kroft asks.

“I think most well-meaning people understand it for what it was. It was a weapon to destroy me, clear and simple,” Thomas says.

Read the rest of the transcript, or watch the video.

Levittown, New York, the epitomy of postwar suburbia, an icon of popular culture turns 60:

It was October 1947 when developer William Jaird Levitt opened the first of what became 17,544 Cape Cod and ranch houses rising from blighted potato fields 40 miles east of New York City, handing post-World War II GIs the keys to their American Dream.

It was an instant success, a prototype widely chronicled and duplicated nationwide.

Cape Cods originally sold for $6,990; ranches were slightly more expensive. Each house had four rooms, a bath, an unfinished attic and amenities _ steel kitchen cabinets, Bendix washer, GE refrigerator, Hotpoint electric range.

None had basements, since excavations would have slowed the almost assembly line construction.

Today, “you can’t get a house in Levittown for less than $400,000,” Cassano said almost incredulously.

As the Levittown Corporation website points out, Levittown’s mass production was envisioned as a solution to the postwar’s high demand for housing:

Near the end of World War II, while serving in the Seabees, the Navy’s construction unit, in the Pacific, William Levitt recognized that the United States would not have enough housing for the returning veterans. The depression of the 1930’s and World War II had discouraged developers from building many new homes. Levitt envisioned a tremendous pent-up demand for housing and, therefore, instructed to those administering the family building business to buy up as much land as they could from Long Island farmers. Even before the war he had acquired 200 acres from one potato farmer, with an option to buy 200 more each year The price of the first parcel was $225 an acre, with options calling for increases of 10 percent each year thereafter. The last acreage that was acquired for Levittown cost $3,500.

Levitt knew that he was not the only person to have anticipated this housing shortage, and he knew that he would have to devise a plan that would give his company a competitive advantage.

After his discharge as a lieutenant from the Seabees, the company came up with a design for a basic house, together with a way to reduce construction procedures to 26 steps. This process, together with the mechanical and technical innovations, they entailed, revolutionized the industry. Levitt actually created an assembly line to build houses on the site, using men and equipment much as they do in the auto industry. The essential difference between Detroit’s methods and Levitt’s was that the auto makers moved materials past a waiting line of men in a factory, whereas the Levitt system moved the workmen from house site to house site past a waiting line of material in the field. Thus, in an industry notorious for wasted time, motion and material, the company introduced previously unheard-of logistics, timing and efficiency.

Levittown’s mass production and its cultural implications is the subject of scorn in this 1960s classic, “Little Boxes.”

Donatella Versace presented her collection Thursday at the Milan Fashion Week 2008. WWD quotes Versace:

“This is for a working woman,” Versace said before the show. “Everything is sensual, but sleek and simple.”

Though she clearly has an idealized impression of what the work-a-day corporate world looks like, her point was well taken: sometimes, calm is the better part of allure. Versace advanced the proposal in a stunning manner, opening with a sexy little nothing of a dress in a beige-y color she dubbed “blonde” under the cover of a roomy, pleasingly familiar jacket. “The blazer is back,” she proclaimed.

And for after office hours, Shallow Nation found this LBD (little black dress) especially pleasing.