Sometimes insomnia bears sweet, sweet fruit, and one of those times came a few nights back, when some late night channel surfing led me to TV’s Illest Minority Moments on VH1. It’s an hour-long special featuring a variety of comedians, actors, intellectuals, and musicians examining the racial subtext (or, in some cases, just text) of […]

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After a relative drought of live music this summer, the next couple weeks are a minor deluge. Between Black Cat, DC 9 and 9:30 Club we’ve got: Zero 7 (9:30/Weds – Though at $25, I may restrain my lounge cheeziness.) Middle Distance Runner at DCist Party (BC/Thurs; alternatively Rogue Wave @ Black Cat) Rainer Maria […]

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That Republicans are no longer the party of small government has long been obvious to just about everyone—bar, perhaps, Lewis Lapham, who invariably uses the monthly interruption of his septuagenarian slumbers to harumph out a 1994-vintage column about the merciless reign of the firebreathing laissez-faire ideologues. It’s almost two years since David Brooks articulated the […]

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You really would have the best laptops on the market if you could manage to make them go 8 months or so without requiring some kind of major overhaul. The Apple Store calls. Again.

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At a first pass, it might seem like unvarnished good news that George Bush has ordered 14 high-level detainees, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, to be transfered to Guantanamo Bay from shady CIA “black sites” abroad, where the oversight is minimal and the interrogations are packed with torturey goodness. But over at TNR, Spencer Ackerman considers […]

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Via the battlin’ bloggers of Boing-Boing, a What If? to send your senses reeling: What if Stan Lee had written Watchmen?

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First, an apology to Megan McCardle’s sister: I did not mean to imperil your hubcaps. For my indirect role in their fate, I am sorry. When blogospheric eminence brunette Jane Galt—”Megan” in what passes for the real world these days—came to town last Friday, I thought it would be as good an excuse as any […]

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Jim Henley pegs it: This story is so intrinsically bizarre that any further commentary is redundant.

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