Those of you who, like me, haven’t cracked the spine of The Canterbury Tales since the tenth grade were probably as puzzled as I was when, in the wake of Jerry Falwell’s death last month, Christopher Hitchens repeatedly described him as a “Chaucerian fraud.” Well, I finally looked it up, so as a public service […]

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John Podhoretz thinks the makers of the insanely costly Evan Almighty have erred seriously in making (as his headline has it “A $200 Million Comedy About Evil Republicans,” which “basically writes off and insults the political views of one-third of the United States.” And how does the movie do this? Well, here’s the plot summary […]

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Cory Doctorow reports that SciFi.com will be pulling their extensive science fiction archive, comprising both classic stories like Norman Spinrad’s “Carcinoma Angels” and original contributions from the likes of Bruce Sterling, Greg Benford, and Ursula Le Guin. Fortunately, this is the Internet, so omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

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Hah!

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A federal court has ordered the popular site TorrentSpy to begin logging user activity, which the Motion Picture Association of America would dearly like to inspect. The article linked above bills this as a victory for the movie industry, but that’s doubtful in the broad sense. If it’s public knowledge that MPAA lawyers are watching […]

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John Hood notes that the conservative civil libertarian group American Freedom Agenda is going after GOP contenders who won’t pledge to uphold habeas corpus and judicial oversight of domestic surveillance, with Mitt Romney first in their sights. I’d love to see this pick up steam. If it doesn’t, a more sober generation of Republicans may […]

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I’ve been remiss in failing to link to Tim Lee’s excellent New York Times op-ed on software patents, but at least my sloth means I can simultaneously links his sharp response to some early criticism. The latter post makes a perceptive Hayekian point which, alas, suggests it should be difficult to get a sound empirical […]

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CEI’s Eli Lehrer weighs in on the lawsuit against eHarmony, the just-for-straights dating site which claims its elaborate matchmaking algorithm just wasn’t designed with gay couples in mind. He writes: It strikes me that there’s an even broader point: A great many of the costs of discrimination exist because it takes place in the physical […]

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Sadly, the images alongside this Esquire article about a live-action Thundercats movie were too clearly Photoshopped for the gag to really sell for more than an instant, but they do seem to have pegged my generation: For a split second, I was pretty excited.

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For reasons not entirely clear even to me, I was looking over Rolling Stone‘s list of “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time”, which gives a little précis of each record and also reports its total sales. I don’t think I need to fear revocation of my libertarian decoder ring if I make the trite […]

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