The makers of Sesame Street released the following message today, in response to a Facebook petition that had called for Bert and Ernie to finally come out and get married: Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from [...]

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Reading Jeremy Waldron’s new paper on torture and “moral absolutes”, the following setup for an action movie that will probably never get made sprang more or less full-formed into my head. The film follows two protagonists: One is a recent recruit to an elite antiterrorism unit (think 24), the other has just stumbled upon (and [...]

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Suppose that, back in the 70s, DARPA had developed two revolutionary networks. In addition to the precursor to the Internet we all know and love, they had also developed a teleportation network enabling small, inorganic objects to be instantly transmitted via miniature wormholes from any point on the network to any other point. The effect [...]

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(1) One of my first thoughts upon getting my hands on an iPad was: “You know, once they get a camera in this thing and come up with a well-tailored group video chat client, this could really change the way people socialize.” At present, in-person, face-to-face socialization and digital communication with people not present are [...]

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I (somewhat hastily) rattled out my 10 favorite albums of 2010 for a GQ musical poll of political “hacks” (hey!), which reveals that there’s at least substantial bipartisan convergence on the FM side of the radio dial. Or would be if people listened to music on the radio anymore. ANYway, for the three of you [...]

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Some of the lyrics to Blur’s “Pressure on Julian” are eerily appropriate to this week’s big story:

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Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok considers some economic explanations for the recent inversion of the traditional dominance of movies over television as “elite entertainment,” primarily the rise of pay-TV and the growing importance of the international market for movies. (Explosions don’t need to be translated, after all.) That’s surely part of it, but I’d be more [...]

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This has always sort of bugged me: You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things And it’s worth it just to hear you say you’re going to give me everything So, first, rhyming “things’ with “thing” is kinda cheating, but let that pass. What’s that “just” in the second [...]

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The Metropolitan Opera has put together a ton of material on the website for their new (and, from the looks of it, absolutely gorgeous) production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Meanwhile, I finally got around to checking out the Radiolab episode “The Ring and I“—which as I’d expect from one of my favorite radio programs, is [...]

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Apropos of the Very! Exciting! News! that Dismemberment Plan—one of my all time favorite bands—is reuniting for a winter tour, here’s “The City” off the classic Emergency & I. (No, seriously, if you don’t have this album, go download it now.) The city has, indeed, been dead since they’ve been gone:

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