I feel like I’ve read that line a few times in the last week, as though it counted as some kind of empirical observation about the electorate. Isn’t it just, you know, a tautology?  France is “centrist” too, relative to the distribution of political opinion there. Update: A commenter suggests that “the country is centrist” […]

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I’ve got a long double review up at Ars of two of privacy scholar Dan Solove’s recent books, one a more abstract and theoretical examination of the concept of privacy in American law, the second more of a case study of how the Internet and social media are making it harder to control our identities […]

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Since this old post still seems to get a fair amount of inbound linkage, I figured I’d help to clarify the origin of the common expression “in the tank”—as in “the media sure are in the tank for Obama/McCain this year!” The original “tank” here is a water tank, which also used to be a […]

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There’s something really comforting to me about looking back at a piece I wrote four or five years ago and thinking, “God, what a clumsy piece of crap.”  If that sounds strange, consider the alternative: I feel like I used to look over stuff from a few year previous and think, “Huh, that’s as good […]

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Ygz makes a sound point about the folly of categorizing foreign actors as “pro-American” or “anti-American” when, for the most part, they’re following their own interests—and whether those interests coincide or conflict with ours is secondary. Actually, I’ve always thought the especially ingenious bit—which I suppose I tacitly endorse with that “ours” in the last […]

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Rob Harper at HuffPo decides to illustrate a manifestly dumb argument: No matter what any one says, whether they are black or white or even God himself (not that he would use the word), it is never, ever OK to use the ‘N’ word. In a joke, in a song, in private conversations, never, ever […]

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If I were to ask you out, would your answer to that question be the same as your answer to this one? (Hat tip to a commenter at Democracy in America.)

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Normally, I’m as big a cheerleader as anyone for the whole peer-produced / wealth-of-networks / here-comes-everybody idea. But I’ve just seen what happens when you try to crowdsource the production of a novel via wiki, and my eyes are still burning. By harnessing the power of the Internet’s distributed intelligence, Penguin produced something orders of […]

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Jessica Valenti is pissed that a relaunch of the Sweet Valley High series has retconned the twin protagonists from a “perfect size 6” to a “perfect size 4.”  I’m sympathetic to the idea that kids literature probably shouldn’t be compounding young girls’ body image issues by stipulating a “perfect” size, whatever it might be.  But […]

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One thing that’s recently become clear to me is that I really need to read a biography of J. Edgar Hoover. Anyone care to recommend one?

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