By way of belated congratulations to happy newlyweds Megan and Peter, I thought I’d reproduce here the short passage I read at the wedding this weekend, and which (with some reservations about “identical in opinions”) fits them to a T:
What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions [...]

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Brad DeLong, in a spate of bloggy nostalgia, reposts an old reference to something I wrote back in 2005, a bit of a thumbsucker on hedonistic and preference utilitarianisms, and the pitfalls of conflating them.  I’d actually forgotten about the argument—though I soon remembered that I’d been delighted and flattered to find that it attracted [...]

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Speaking of assessing people’s productivity in society, I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce publicly that at the end of the month I’ll be rejoining the ranks of the gainfully employed, with the delightfully vague title of Research Fellow at the Cato Institute.  My mandate will be fairly open-ended: Basically, [...]

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So, I’m enjoying the opportunity to start doing some freelancing and probably going to take a couple more weeks enjoying the liberty to do a bunch of that. But fairly soon, I’m probably going to have to start looking for something a bit more stable. Since I’m already in DC, since this is where I [...]

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This weekend I got to seriously considering whether perhaps I hadn’t better just pack it in and make a fresh start in some less doomed, more remunerative industry—which at present is pretty much anything short of buggy-whip manufacture. Maybe it’s failure of imagination, but to my own astonishment, I realized I was hard pressed to [...]

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Much as I hate to admit it, and much as I regard the vast majority of people pushing the “Internet makes us dumber” line as vacuous douchebags, this seems about right.
Addendum: A commenter objects that the Internet is not displacing more “worthy” activities (reading Proust, socializing) but merely providing a new way to do these [...]

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You know, if it’s good enough for Marcy Wheeler, I may as well mention that I’m probably going to be living the penurious freelancer life for at least a few weeks while I figure out what I want to do post Condé-layoffs. I’m also going to be blogging here much more regularly in my newly [...]

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Well,  good news and bad news, dear readers. The bad news is that, while it’s been  fun and interesting to hop aboard an expanding publication known primarily for its hard tech coverage, and to try to bring their trademark geeky rigor to the task of reporting on tech policy and politics, it also turns out [...]

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In the interest of deterring my own future self from defecting from my longstanding scheme to quit smoking at 30, I’m announcing publicly that I’m now officially smoke-free.  While I’d like to believe it’s possible for even ex-smokers to—eventually—enjoy the occasional cigarette without careening into a life of sin and degradation, I’m thinking that it [...]

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I always feel like I  ought to try to make it out to these “Twin Tech” events for professional reasons but dear God, if an evil genius designed a venue with the goal of driving me to shoot myself in the face, they’d come up with something like this place.  Would anyone with a scintilla [...]

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