As it turns out, Bacos are vegan.

[Read more →]

So like lots of people today, I’m home at the family’s for Thanksgiving dinner, and was mulling over the significance of the holiday. We non-believers don’t have a God to thank for whatever it is we’re happy about. The secular language of pop culture typically leaves out reference to God altogether, and we just hear […]

[Read more →]

Once in a great while, there comes an article so breathtakingly stupid, so heroic in its inanity, that as one reads it, even inanimate objects in the surrounding area seem to radiate intelligence by comparison. This farcical piece on gay marriage by Stanley Kurtz of National Review is just such an article. “Right now,” Kurtz […]

[Read more →]

Why does pain feel bad? That might seem an incoherent thing to ask – isn’t that just part of what it means for something to be “painful?” As we typically use the word “pain,” that probably is right. What I mean to ask is how the specific sensory qualities of all the experiences we class […]

[Read more →]

An announcement on the Harvard philosophy department page notes that philosopher John Rawls died Sunday. Perhaps this is unusual for someone with my political position, but I was very much influenced by Rawls — perhaps almost as much as by his antithesis, Robert Nozick, who we lost a little less than a year ago. Rawls’s […]

[Read more →]

In response to my musing below on the possibility of a War of the Worlds style form-hopping story/game, Jesse Walker and Dave Tepper inform me that it’s pretty much already been done. Microsoft and the producers of the movie A.I. put together an elaborate murder mystery, dubbed “The Beast,” which played out on a series […]

[Read more →]

In honor of the forthcoming documentary about Robert Anton Wilson: RAW wrote in one or another of his books that weirdo genius extraordinaire Buckminster Fuller used to perform the following exercise to limber up his mind. He’d go out to a hill just before “sunset,” and watching the sky repeat to himself “The sun is […]

[Read more →]

An actor I’ve always had a soft spot for, James Coburn, died Monday. I mention this because he starred in one of my top five or ten favorite movies, a vastly underrated political satire and spy-flick parody called The President’s Analyst. If you haven’t seen it, give it a shot sometime.

[Read more →]

Spurred by Brink Lindsey’s Halloween post, I downloaded a recording of the famous, panic-inducing radio play adaptation of War of the Worlds. It occured to me that one reason that a modern equivalent couldn’t have that effect — aside from our greater familiarity with the story-that-claims-not-to-be — is that we’re compulsive channel (and browser) clickers. […]

[Read more →]

I neglected to mention — this weekend, I sat behind Art Garfunkel on a train. That is all.

[Read more →]