Will notes a creative writing contest centering on the (fictional) discipline of Law and Aesthetics. But it occurs to me that, actually, the major theories advanced to offer an account of “what art is” (at least as I’ve understood them from Will, who’s teaching aesthetics at Howard U. this semester) parallel reasonably closely the major […]

[Read more →]

Y’know, this TCS piece gets at something I’ve been thinking throughout the Road to Serfdom 60th-aniversary hoopla. (In D.C. libertarian circles, anyway, there’s hoopla.) Because everyone seems to want to say that the book is just as relevant, or even more relevant, than when it was published. And it clearly just isn’t. Look, I love […]

[Read more →]

Seems everyone, most recently colleague Brian Doherty in The American Spectator, is offering muted congratulations to Dave Sim on the publication of the final, 300th issue of Cerebus, completing a comic book story that began some two years before I was born. Many of the comments are in the same vein as those of (the […]

[Read more →]

I’m as apalled as anyone by Noam Chomsky’s apologies for people like Pol Pot, but I think Pejman Yousefzadeh is off base in this TechCentralStation piece, which takes the linguist-cum-radical-pundit to task for focusing on perceived U.S. wrongdoing when there are so many indisputably heinous abusers of human rights out there. I don’t want to […]

[Read more →]

Jim Henley has written a great piece on the status of the superhero story in American letters.

[Read more →]

Constructive critiques from anyone who attended the Hipublicans panel this week are appreciated.

[Read more →]

Matt Yglesias has a post where he says that slippery slope arguments are often “logically” false but “empirically” correct. This gives me an opportunity to highlight a minor argumentative pet peeve of mine: the conflation of reductio arguments and slippery slope arguments, which are related but distinct—and I think it’s a distinction worth preserving. The […]

[Read more →]

Jon Rowe notes a decision in an intellectual property case [PDF] that pitts comics legends Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane against each other. In addition to whatever legal interest the case may offer, you also get to read Judge Richard Posner explicate—quite accurately—the origin story of Spawn. So now, in addition to law and economics, […]

[Read more →]

Appease this.

[Read more →]

Birthday present from the Sexy Economist™: This framed poster of “The Prisoner,” signed by Patrick McGoohan! And she made an indescribably tasty kiwi-strawberry cheesecake. I think this must explain my affinity for theories of justice that don’t put too much emphasis on desert… (err, moral desert, not the cheescake kind).

[Read more →]