To be sure, you are not familiar with that dungeon cell that was called the little-ease in the Middle Ages. In general, one was forgotten there for life. That cell was distinguished from others by ingenious dimensions. It was not high enough to stand up in nor yet wide enough to lie down in. One […]

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Strolling about the awful plenitude of our massive suburban mall during my habitually last-minute Christmas shopping, I was delighted to notice that one of my all-time favorite films, The President’s Analyst (starring the late James Coburn), has made it to DVD, apparently with some footage and music that had long been cut because of copyright […]

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As it happened, just before plunging in to the new translation of Swann’s Way I’d picked up a few days previous, I dipped into Richard Dawkins’ A Devil’s Chaplain (a well-chosen gift from my mother, as I’d nearly bought it for myself on one or two occasions) to read an essay taking off from the […]

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The chaps at OxBlog think it’s odd that Bush gets a bad rap as a Jeebus freak, while people apparently glossed over such comments from Dwight Eisenhower as this one: Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith. Now, there are those of us with the quaint notion […]

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Some of the discussion occasioned by the new reason piece reminds me of what I think is a common misunderstanding that complicates a lot of cultural arguments. Now, the question of whether anyone should be upset by “happy holidays” is at least partly distinct from the question of why one might say “happy holidays”rather than […]

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I look at claims of an “anti-Christmas jihad” in a new piece over at Reason. (My original headline, incidentally, was “Mulled Whine.”)

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So, in general I agree with—and have often been a source of—criticism of this administration’s tax shifts in the guise of tax cuts. Spending ultimately has to be paid for eventually, so if you cut taxes and keep on spending, you’re ultimately committed to taxing someone sooner or later to cover the tab. And on […]

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From Will Baude’s latest TNR piece: Keeping cameras out of the courtroom and allocating argument time strictly, as Rehnquist has done, creates the image of a formalistic, aloof Court. This has the benefit of allowing the Court to appear above the political fray; but it has the disadvantage of making the Court seem like an […]

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I see that Radley has used P.J. Doland’s word frequency cruncher to create a list of all the words used on his site, in order of how often they’ve been used. I suspect that the Italo Calvino fans out there immediately thought, as I did, of a certain passage from If on a Winter’s Night […]

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I’ll profess a certain amount of befuddlement at the very sharp Antony Flew’s apparent reasons for backing off his well-known atheism. The gist seems to be that he’s dissatisfied with the various accounts of how complex organic molecules might have first emerged, as well as being swayed by “fine tuning” arguments to the effect that […]

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