I actually am sufficiently out of the loop that I thought this had already happened weeks ago, but today fellow white-hispanic conspiracy member Matt Yglesias officially ditches the title “writing fellow” and is promoted to “staff writer” at the Prospect. You know where to send the flowers.

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I kind of like this one. And, since I haven’t been remembering to link my Reason pieces lately, this one too.

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Will Wilkinson pointed this phenomenon out to me a couple of months ago, and now, like a man who’s just finished a particularly compelling conspiracy novel, I’m seeing it everywhere: The use in casual conversation of totally superfluous negations in the process of affirming something. I’m talking about things like: GUY 1: You’re coming tomorrow […]

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Well, not really, no more so than Samuel Pepys, I suppose. But I finally got to leafing through a collection of the great Italian fabulist‘s collection of autobiographical writing, Hermit in Paris. The first major section is a series of letters from the states, mostly New York, arranged under rather blog-like subject headings. Calvino sent […]

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Last Friday, I finally got around to seeing Farenheit 9/11, and I’m afraid I don’t have a whole lot to add to what’s already been said, though I think it probably bodes ill for Bush that a movie this bad, on a number of levels, sold out every showing but the 11:00 and the midnight […]

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I’m always a little puzzled by a rhetorical strategy I occasionally encounter in friendly political arguments. I’ll often, unsurprisingly enough, end up taking a libertarian position, and midway through the back-and-forth, my interlocutor will respond with something like: “Well, you’re a libertarian, so of course you think that, but…” as if to suggest that an […]

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Speaking of Glen, he’s got a nice, Seuss inspired analysis of two kinds of “games” driving patronage at bars and other social spots. Which makes me think of a devious way an unscrupulous bar owner could undermine his competitors. Say you’ve got a spot you’re trying to market to one of several self-segregating demographics—following Glen, […]

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Neal Whitman, brother of ex-roomie-cum-econoblogger Glen Whitman, has launched his own linguistics blog, Literal-Minded. Check it.

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I’ve been reading a lot of different books recently that talk about the problem (well, sometimes they’re good, but sometimes they’re a problem) of information cascades. And that got me thinking about Google searches. See, in the post below, I wanted to hyperlink the term reservation price, so non-econogeek types who might not recognize the […]

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Economics is all about preferences. We take for granted that we’ve got a set of goals, desires, and ends; the fun in the model is mostly about figuring out how more-or-less rational people fit means to those ends. And, maybe mostly as a simplifying assumption, we usually think of those as defined pretty precisely well […]

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