If you’ve ever held a microphone too close to its own speaker, you’ve experienced in a direct and irritating way the power of feedback loops. Often, feedback loops are useful: game theorists will tell you they can hasten convergence on an equilibrium outcome in collective action problems, and the evolutionary feedback loop generated by the […]

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NPR just announced that it’s Fatboy Slim’s 39th birthday. They apparently thought that more important than making note of one Milton Friedman’s 90th. Surprise surprise. Anyway, be sure to celebrate Friedman day right: use an illegal drug, purchase sex services, fire a handgun, visit a private school, or establish a currency with a stable M2. […]

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“Is it illegal to have sex with a monkey’s corpse?”

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There’s something inexplicably haunting about the art over at Exploding Dog. I still have a fair amount of whitespace on my walls, and I’m pondering picking up a print. Suggestions welcome from those of you who know the lay of my apartment.

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The most recent edition of the NPR program On the Media featured an interview with a VP at the production company for a forthcoming TV variety show called “Live from Tomorrow.” The catch is that the show will run sans commercials, instead integrating products to be plugged “organically” into the show. So, for example, one […]

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“Looks like I’ll have to crash. No, no, go to bed, ignore me. Just think of me as a sweaty, humping pillow.”

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It has long been a catchphrase on “the right”–I will, just for a moment, grudgingly accept that bundling of libertarians and conservatives–that “ideas have consequences.” We are especially attuned to the truth of that phrase because we are so acutely aware that only the failure of classical liberal thinkers to adequately defend the liberal order […]

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So what good is one more bloated and typically silly piece from Michael Novak? That latest one did at least produce a beautifully crafted response from Will. Since he trashes the most banal part of Novak’s argument effectively enough, I’ll limit myself to one ancillary observation. The piece opens with familiar rhetoric about how the […]

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I’ve just discovered the Flaming Lips‘ new album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. In addition to digging the sound — a garage-band-with-the-garage-full-of-helium sort of affair — I was impressed with their decision to make the album available online. Unlike most of the major labels, which are playing a lawyer-and-lobbyist heavy lock-up strategy with their content, […]

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There’s an entertaining highbrow pissing match between Cato’s own Tom G. Palmer and a guy named David Bollier from the New America Foundation linked at Tom’s blog. It’s a little hard to tell just what NAF is about; they do have the usually-interesting Newsday columnist James Pinkerton, but they also sponsor the insufferable Jebediah Purdy, […]

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