Over the past couple of weeks, a pair of posts I wrote about what I dubbed “epistemic closure” on the right kicked off a surprisingly broad set of conversations and debates—mostly, I suspect, because it slapped a name on a phenomenon that a lot of people already recognized, and which many conservatives were themselves feeling […]

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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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The headline on yesterday’s New York Times piece on the demographics of Tea Partiers read: “Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated“—than the general public, that is. The nutgraf adds that they’re also likely to be older, whiter, maler, and (shocking!) more conservative. Now, the obvious question for me is: Why wouldn’t you […]

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The wires are reporting that former senior NSA executive Thomas Drake has been indicted for leaking classified material to a reporter at a national paper. The paper and reporter are unnamed, but we get a date range for the articles published using Drake’s information: late February 2006 through November 2007. I can’t help but notice […]

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I’ve written a bit lately about what I see as a systematic trend toward “epistemic closure” in the modern conservative movement. As commenters have been quick to point out, of course, groupthink and confirmation bias are cognitive failings that we’re all susceptible to as human beings, and scarcely the exclusive province of the right. I […]

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A pretty brilliant response to the merry bilious little band from Westboro Baptist:

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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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As I was coming up with my own list of “influential” books and scanning some of the ones others picked, I got to thinking a bit about just what we mean when we say a book “influenced” us. People used the term in a variety of ways, but it seemed as though most of 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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When it’s a carefully-worded statement from Lindy Matsko, the vice principal implicated in the Pennsylvania school webcam spying lawsuit: “At no time have I ever monitored a student via a laptop webcam,” said Matsko, who is in her 25th year working for Lower Merion School District, “nor have I ever authorized the monitoring of a […]

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