Y’know, I’ll fully acknowledge that left-leaning groupthink is a perfectly real phenomenon in academe, but this parody sums up pretty well how a lot of the whining on the right—from libertarians as well as conservatives—has always struck me. That the large majority of highly educated people paid to think about philosophy and economics every day […]

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I did a classic Jon Stewar–style “doi-oi-oi” spring-necked double-take and eye-rub at this one: Matt Yglesias is blogging to take to task the right side of the blogosphere for their silence on democratic progress in Egypt and its potential validation of Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom.”

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Borrowing a page from Andrew Sullivan, I decided earlier this month at Hit and Run to inaugurate the Allan Bloom and Jedediah Purdy awards. Well, this Michelle Malkin column seems like a good first candidate for the Ernest Hemingway Award for Journalists with No Built-In Bullshit Detector. It’s about the practice of “cutting”—you may recall […]

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I already posted a few comments at Hit and Run prompted by Jon Chait’s silly piece in the last New Republic and Will Wilknson’s good reply. But now that I’ve had a chance to read the piece more closely, I notice it’s significantly dimmer than I’d realized. First, kind of a nitpick: Among other problems, […]

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I just had a brief back and forth with Whole Foods honcho John Mackie about this Walter Williams column in which the economist (whose work I typically enjoy, by the by) excoriates “weak-kneed CEOs” who “capitulate” to anti-capitalist NGOs by agreeing to carry “fair trade” products when, as the Milton Friedman line has it, a […]

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The artsy publisher Taschen is apparently issuing a new edition of the long-out-of-print Hunter S. Thompson book Curse of Lono. It’s a hefty 300 beans, but it’s a big illustrated hardcover in a limited edition of 1000 copies, each signed by both Thompson and artist Ralph Steadman. I’m a sufficiently hardcore Thompsonite that I sucked […]

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The reactions to Radley Balko’s recent Fox column on blogs are a pretty good illustration of something I mentioned worrying about a couple weeks back—this necrotic, self-congratulatory mind-set wherein anything short of unchecked blog triumphalism is shoehorned into this cartoonish Old Media Dinos vs. Spry Furry Blogger Mammals narrative. Of course, far from being “old […]

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At CPAC this weekend, I got talking with another journalist about the Wall Street Journal‘s dubious choice to hide its content behind a fee barrier, a decision which is gradually making it less relevant—since stories in the Journal are far less likely to be discussed in the blogosphere, to which other traditional media are increasingly […]

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It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—that kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run. . . . My central memory of that time […]

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I’m at the Conservative Political Action Conference—I’ll be blogging away over at Hit and Run.

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