In light of the resurgent fuss about race and IQ sparked by Will Saletan’s Slate columns, I may as well weigh in on the side of those who think this is just a largely unfruitful topic, at least for the popular press. I have no idea whether there are any average genetically-rooted intelligence differences between […]

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I’m no McCain fan, but I think I want that on a T-shirt.

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In lieu of actual original blog content for today, you might check out a couple of my recent posts at Techdirt: One on Megan Meier and “open source rough justice,” another about the legal history bearing on recent reports that law enforcement officers are often able to track the physical location of cell phones without […]

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Kerry Howley writes about handwringing in the UK over proposals to allow lesbian couples to more easily avail themselves of IVF technology, the putative objection being to the creation of kids who are “fatherless by design.” As Kerry points out, this sloppily conflates the situation of kids growing up in single parent homes (which are […]

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I can’t tell whether James “PoMoCon” Poulos is appalled or just bemused by Russian nostalgia for the Soviet era, in the form of high-priced hipster tees featuring communist iconography. But while it’s a bit unsettling to see the symbols of one of history’s bloodiest regimes treated like a Thundercats logo, I’m nevertheless generally delighted to […]

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From Jeff Jacoby’s recent Globe column: Blind opposition to war that seems lost is understandable. But can Democrats be so invested in defeat that they would abandon even a war that may be winnable? I’m not sure why there’s such a tone of shock in that second sentence: Of course a war might be winnable […]

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Stephanie Coontz, whose excellent history of marriage I reviewed a while back, makes the case for less state involvement in matrimony in today’s New York Times. She points out that the government’s central place in marriage is both relatively recent and has an unappealing history.

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Lots of blogosphere buzz over a recent Heritage study purporting to find that Democrats are the real “party of the rich”—which is sort of odd given that, except at the absolute megabillions tippy-top of the income distribution, it’s well established that income and voting Republican are positively correlated. Until you look at what they’re actually […]

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I chat with author and comics critic Douglas Wolk about some of the themes raised in the recent World War Hulk crossover.

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In a response to an essay posted over the weekend at Daily Kos, The Weekly Standard‘s Dean Barnett provides a perfect example of how toxically warped up our foreign policy debate has become. Citing an article about the pullout of British troops from Basra, Kos diarist Jeffrey Feldman runs with a suggestion offered by British […]

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