It’s an article of faith in social conservative circles that unilateral divorce has been a disaster, precipitating the collapse of the American family. Tyler Cowen begs to differ in today’s New York Times. Citing

[Read more →]

Scott Lemieux observes that (contra what many suggest) there’s no reason to expect Supreme Court decisions weakening Roe to simply “throw it back to the states”—as the very law at issue in the recent ruling demonstrates pretty clearly. Because, as we all know, terminating a pregnancy, like growing pot for personal use in your backyard, […]

[Read more →]

Plenty of folk more qualified to comment are already all over today’s Supreme Court decision upholding a 2003 band on D&X abortions, but a couple things struck me. First, the Court accepts at face value Congress’ (apparently false) finding that D&X is never “medically necessary,” which is why the court let the law stand even […]

[Read more →]

I’m glad that various leftish writers are condemning the Family Research Council’s absurd suggestion that the recent study showing the ineffectiveness of abstinence education just proves the need to pour more money and resources into abstinence programs. I can now rest assured that I’ll never hear them making that kind of argument the next time […]

[Read more →]

Hat Tip: Laure. More Alexyss Tylor at her website and MySpace page. Bonus fact: The older woman sitting there during this little monologue? Her mom. Addendum: Hm, Ms. Tylor appears to have gotten the clip pulled from YouTube… rather inexplicably, since to judge by the Technorati curve over the last couple days, it was rapidly […]

[Read more →]

Sociologist Duncan Watts (whom I interviewed a couple years back) has an article in the New York Times Magazine on the idea of “cumulative advantage” in culture markets—a kind of aesthetic version of Schelling points or stock bubbles that, says Watts, explains why it’s so hard to predict what will become the “next big thing” […]

[Read more →]

In a bizarre coincidence, two separate people in as many weeks have independently remarked to me that they recall feeling their first erotic stirrings when the watched the classic flick Labyrinth, starring David Bowie as the glam goblin king Jareth. (Or, as one of the aforementioned correspondents described him, a “hot, mysterious, slightly fey older […]

[Read more →]

Garance Franke-Ruta detects “1950s thinking” in the police decision not to immediately warn students about a killer on the loose at VA Tech. This seems uncharitable. Obviously, in hindsight, we all wish a warning had been issued and the campus closed. But most people who kill someone don’t then go on a shooting spree. And […]

[Read more →]

An interesting point from Ezra as an afterthought on his recent appearance at Cato: Towards the close of the event, someone in the audience argued that moving towards a national system would hugely retard medical innovation. I never understand the evidence for this claim. A huge amount of the tech advances come from public institutions […]

[Read more →]

Via AmSpec, a new report by the research firm Mathematica finds that, in a way, both sides in the war over abstinence education have gotten it wrong: Abstinence programs don’t leave the kids who do become sexually active more likely to have unprotected sex, but neither do they make any difference in whether and when […]

[Read more →]