In my post on Smith v. Maryland below, I forgot to take note of two mindboggling claims from the Stephen Spruiell piece I linked. First, Spruiell finds one Bush-the-First legal flack to claim, incredibly, that… well, I’ll just quote it so you don’t think I’m making it up: “I think it’s fair to say that […]

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Neil the Ethical Werewolf has a post up at Ezra Klein’s joint defending the idea of objective morality from Matt Yglesias, who had two quick posts on the topic last week. I’ll agree with Matt at least this far: I very much doubt the majority of the folks who fling the term “relativist” around as […]

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Ah, my geek heart warms: a photoshop contest in which comic book characters, mostly of the spandexed persuasion, are inserted into classic paintings (or, in a few cases, sculptures). [HT: Boing Boing]

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Since I’d been focusing on a variety of other things, I never did say anything about the NSA’s call-pattern data mining program, which USA Today disclosed earlier this month. So here’s one belated thought about Smith v. Maryland, the 1979 Supreme Court case establishing that pen registers and trap-and-trace devices (which record the numbers dialed […]

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I’d meant to reply to a post over at Yglesias’ a little while back that examined one theory about D.C.’s notoriously stoic rock audiences: It’s suggested to be a legacy of Fugazi front-man Ian MacKaye’s disdain for fratboy moshers, which metastasized into a general loathing of motion. This actually got me thinking about an interesting […]

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In response to immigration minimalists who worry about the stress influxes of poor immigrants put on social programs, libertarians are fond of responding that the problem, then, is with the programs and not the immigrants. In the May issue of the Atlantic, Clive Crook makes the point with the emphasis shifted slightly (subsc.): On the […]

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James Markels has a piece up at the America’s Future Foundation’s Brainwash webzine puzzling over why Apple insists on charging the same price, 99 cents, for every song on iTunes, whether it’s the top single on the Billboard charts or one of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s lesser known tunes. (I just had a […]

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So, this Chronicle of Higher Ed piece by Michael Kimmel on “guy lit” started off as a promising deflation of that curious genre of fiction—think High Fidelity or Indecision—populated by 30-something slacker manchildren who have bundles of witticisms where a personality is supposed to be. Or, rather, have nothing but personality—personas without persons behind them. […]

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Earlier this week, I recorded an episode of Blogging Heads TV with my friend and fellow pale-as-hell-political-writer-with-a-Hispanic-last-name, Matt Yglesias. (In keeping with whatever perverse principle required the first couple generations of ska bands to include some pun involving “ska” in their names, they’re calling these “diavlogs.”) Alas, our discussion was aborted due to technical difficulties […]

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