Back from the holidays and ready to blog. In the meantime, you can check out the track “Merry X-Mas” from Quasi’s forthcoming album.

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I’m on it this week, talking about the “War on Christmas” and throwing in my $0.02 on a few other topics as well.

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If you’re in the city Wednesday evening, there’s a benefit concert for an old high-school classmate of mine, Jennifer Falkenstern, who has been fighting leukemia. Stop by and help out if you can.

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I’m on vacation this week, and I’ve got a backlog of posts I’ve been meaning to write for this blog, but the bulk of my blogging will probably be over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, where Ross Douthat and I will be filling in while Andrew’s on a book-writing sabbatical from blogging.

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I’ve got a less-than-glowing review [PDF] of British philosopher Ted Honderich’s Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? in the current issue of Cato Journal.

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“Balls to the Wal” is my review of Robert Greenwald’s new anti-Wal-Mart documentary.

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Hit and Run commenter Warren gets off the best one-line reply to the silly boycotts of stores that dare to greet customers with “Happy Hollidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”: Remember when the faithful use to complain that Xmas was too commercial? Now they complain that commerce is insufficiently monotheist.

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Steven Levitt responds to some critics of his “legal abortion lowers crime” thesis, drawing a comments reply from Steve Sailer, who’s been among the most vocal opponents of the hypothesis. I have nothing useful to contribute on the econometric dispute about the data, but I do want to take a stab at one of the […]

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There’s a post by Brad Plumer at the Mother Jones blog that makes the following argument for the “corporate death penalty” (i.e. dissolution of corporate charters for companies that misbehave): Wal-Mart, along with other corporate interests, gets involved in politics precisely to neuter the legal system that’s supposed to act as a “remedy”–trying to limit […]

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Beware Serenity spoilers ahead… Michae Ghertner at Catallarchy makes a point about the Firefly movie Serenity that had stuck in my head in the theater: At the close of the film’s climactic battle, the Operative has a last-minute conversion (saving the Serenity crew) when Mal shows him evidence that the government had dosed an entire […]

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