The infamous Matt Welch was in town last week and mentions having met “the raffish Julian Sanchez.” raff·ish (adj: ‘ra-fish) 1 : marked by or suggestive of flashy vulgarity or crudeness 2 : marked by a careless unconventionality : rakish I’m shooting for definition 2 here, though since most of our interaction involved a variety […]

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So, when I’ve written about music here of late, it’s been about opera and indie rock mostly. But as folks who’ve known me for a while know, I was a hippie in a former life. So I felt a bit of nostalgic sadness when I was forwarded news by an old friend that uberjamband Phish […]

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I’ve disagreed with Instapundit plenty since the war started gearing up, but this post, which Yglesias links, is truly pathetic. Months after it’s been clear to everyone that the WMD rationale for the war was bogus, a couple shells of sarin, source unclear, show up… and those of us who are still connected to reality […]

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Trip to Borders this week netted a bunch of albums I’d been meaning to pick up for some time but hadn’t gotten ’round to yet: Modest Mouse: Good News for People Who Love Bad News The Vines: Winning Days TV on the Radio: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babies Franz Ferdinand: Franz Ferdinand Yeah Yeah Yeahs: […]

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When last we saw Jenny Roback Morse, she was holding forth on the link between marriage and human nature, undeterred by her complete scientific illiteracy. Now she’s produced another farrago of a piece on the subject—one of those that’s so confused in so many different ways, you barely know where to begin. The central argument […]

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I’m never surprised to come across some tendentious self-congratulatory piece of the “if you’re not a liberal at 18…” variety, wherein some conservative muses on what kind of personal pathology might induce people to persist in the immature “liberal” phase past the age of reason. But it’s always a little disappointing when philosophy professors stoop […]

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Caught Word Wars this weekend with the Sexy Economist™: It’s a documentary about the competitive Scrabble circuit which, like its spiritual cousin Spellbound, is much more interesting than it sounds. The film follows four stranger-than-fiction competitors: a Zen-spouting, Tai Chi practicing trifecta champ; a gangly, Maalox-quaffing nebbish from Brooklyn; a dope-smokin’ “pre-Mecca Malcolm” from Baltimore, […]

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I’ve always found grating the claims of some pundits that Christians, a huge majority of the American population, are some sort of downtrodden, persecuted minority. Usually what’s meant is that in a pluralistic society, it’s less and less the case that one group’s religious conception is woven into the public legal structure, and that cultural […]

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…should take care lest he become a blogger. I take some small satisfaction in noting that a certain Betty-Page-lookalike ex, who made a bit of fun when I started a blog back when we were dating, now has a blog of her own. It’s good, though primarily of interest to Fresnans and others on the […]

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In the wake of Brian Doherty’s article on the tax protest movement, I’ve seen a handful of letters from folks with links to a variety of sites pimping elaborate theories showing how, if you pull a sentence here or there from a few statutes and Supreme Court opinions, you can “prove” you’re not obligated to […]

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