I was recently flattered to be asked to do an installment of Crescat Sententia’s 20 Questions. The whole series is interesting: there are links to previous editions on CS’s left-column blogroll.

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A new CBO report on the long term budget outlook inspired some reflections on the problems of reforming entitlement spending in “Ride the Death Spiral.”

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Raised in a thoroughly secular household, the odds of my becoming a believer were probably slim from the start. But it was, oddly enough, Christmas that ensured it’d never happen. I don’t remember clearly when my parents first told me about Santa Claus, but I do remember being skeptical. Flying reindeer? How was that possible? […]

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While home for the holidays, Dad handed me a copy of a book inscribed to him by one of his former medical students: The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski. I started and finished it that same evening: An engaging, deftly written first novel that—being about people recently out of college finding their footing—I (unsurprisingly) found […]

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Among various gifts I was delighted to receive this Festivus (including a badass chess set to replace one destroyed by rampaging kittens) was the full run (on DVD) of Joss Whedon‘s fantastic sci-fi western Firefly, which was cancelled last year by shortsighted Fox executives in what historians will doubtless regard as the biggest cultural travesty […]

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Christmas is the time of year that brings out my least liberal, most elitist instincts, because it’s one of very few times each year I end up forcing myself into a mall to try to find gifts for miscellaneous relatives in the minimum possible time. (I couldn’t quite stomach it this year—I left after a […]

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Word is, the Olsen twins will be enrolling at my alma mater, where I hope and expect that their peers will subject them to the daily torture that they have so richly earned.

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No, no, I’m not referring to Kant’s dictum that all rational beings are obligated to have anal sex, but to this post by Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber. He’s toying with a version of consequentialism that he believes evades some familiar intuitive objections to utilitarianism: Itâ??s a form of consequentialism, so in general it says […]

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When I find myself wondering whether some new buzz-drenched band is worth checking out, my first stop is usually Pitchfork Media, which has posted its list of the best 50 albums of 2003. There are some unaccountable omissions—the new Death Cab album Transatlanticism, which takes a few listens to grow on you but is quite […]

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Last night at Cato Prom (aka the annual Cato Xmas party / cruise) a friend informed me that a few lines from my recent piece on campaign finance reform got picked up in USA Today. I do hope people realize I was kidding: I got one e-mail shortly after the original article went online excoriating […]

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