I’ve been memed! As Yglesias points out, “five things most people don’t know about you” is a bit ambiguous. If “most people” is constrained even as loosely as “most readers of this blog,” then that’ll be pretty much everything wide of my political views and maybe musical taste. If it’s meant to mean “most people […]

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This week’s New Yorker reprints an excellent Nobel lecture by Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who took this year’s literature prize.

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I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but it seems that Virginia Republican Virgil Goode is up to the task: [I]f American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. I fear that in the […]

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Via Boing Boing, the audio book edition of John Hodgman’s hilarious The Areas of My Expertise is now available free on iTunes.

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Housemate and journalist extraordinaire Kerry Howley reports that her bicycle’s front wheel just got stolen in broad daylight from bustling K Street downtown. How the hell does this happen? I understand how someone might be able to surreptitiously steal a bike seat, as often happens, but a bike wheel is pretty damn conspicuous, and presumably […]

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Lots of us small-government types were pleasantly surprised by Dems’ willingness to keep funding for the coming year at 2006 levels, stripping out billions in pork pending earmark reform. The New York Times has, uh, a different take: The delay was initially due to infighting among Republicans, sparked by President Bush, who gunned for a […]

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The “War on Christmas” bollocks seems, mercifully, to be on the wane this year, except as an inspiration for Halloween costumes. But it’s still worth taking a gander at Slate‘s examination of the rather long provenance of “Happy Holidays” as a pluralist seasonal greeting, notwithstanding recent attempts to paint it as some kind of 21st […]

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Interesting claim from U.S. News columnist Bonnie Erbe that only 15 million of the 45 million uninsured in America are in households earning less thant $25,000 annually. She suggests that the government could buy catastrophic health insurance for all of them at about $3,000 each, and leave the better off to attend to their own […]

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A few years back, I wrote a review of a nigh-universally panned farrago of a book called The Cheating Culture, and used as my introductory example my friend and onetime roommate Glen Whitman, an econ professor who has a special gift for (and Javerian relentlessness in) catching plagiarists and cheaters. Apparently, my example was inadvertently […]

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I think the Libertarian Party may well have served some useful function over the last 35 years, but at present (and in the absence of major and highly improbable changes in our electoral system) I’m inclined to endorse Bruce Bartlett’s take: My conclusion is that for libertarian ideas to advance, the Libertarian Party must go […]

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