Scene: Friday evening, 9 p.m., a group of friends are gathered around a living room table for poker night. Harry: OK, folks, snack time. I’m thinking we should order a couple pies from that new gourmet pizza place. Darrell: What, Mama Solyndra’s? That place is so overpriced! Let’s just go with some chips and salsa [...]

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Gallup reports a record high number of respondents telling pollsters they “approve” of marriages between blacks and whites. In one sense, this is obviously great news, but something about the question itself bothered me. In part, it was that the framing still embeds the assumption that “marriages between blacks and whites,” a term that encompasses [...]

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Is it ever an advantage to be crazy? Or at least, to be perceived as crazy? Richard Nixon thought so: During the cold war, he notoriously developed his “madman theory,” a stratagem of having senior aides circulate their “concerns” that Nixon had gone unhinged, and might just hit that big red button if provoked, even [...]

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In the Harry Potter books, the titular boy wizard is the subject of a mystical prophecy, destined to come into mortal conflict with the evil Lord Voldemort—and perhaps even capable of vanquishing him. But there’s a wrinkle: One of Harry’s classmates, Neville Longbottom, also fits most of the prophecy’s description: born at the end of [...]

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Dan Davies at Crooked Timber points out an inconsistency in a common argument for voting for a major party: The key point I want to make here is that when major party activists put the guilt-trip on supporters significantly to their left, they engage in what looks like very fallacious reasoning. The point is that [...]

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James Joyner captures my thoughts on the recent silliness pretty well. Basically, nobody comes out of this looking good. First, CBS.  Frankly, the journalist in me finds it sort of offensive that they were willing to publish serial plagiarist Ben Domenech on any topic—some things really ought to earn you a lifetime ban from respectable [...]

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Amid the buzz over David Frum’s recent ouster from the American Enterprise Institute, some folks have linked back to this old post on the now-hoary trope that heterodox conservatives are simply angling for invitations to the fabled Georgetown Cocktail Parties. There’s a certain irony here in that Frum himself is no stranger to attacking the [...]

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In a recent New Yorker piece bemoaning standard Beltway coverage of politics as all maneuvering and image management, George Packer imagined the same style applied to foreign coverage—intending to highlight how absurd it seems: Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully [...]

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This HuffPo piece strikes me as just about right. Look, I don’t think Sarah Palin is terribly bright, but even I assume that if she can deliver a speech without notes, she can remember four or five bullet-point “priorities” without recourse to a list scrawled on her hand. If, for some reason, she couldn’t, I [...]

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Something that’s implicit in a lot of defenses of the Citizens United ruling I’ve seen in the past day is probably worth noting explicitly: The ban on independent corporate/union expendituures for “electioneering communications” that the court struck down was actually quite narrow.  Basically it covered TV and radio advertising, and didn’t touch myriad other forms [...]

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