I caught a late-night showing of Superman Returns with some folk last night, inclement weather having ruled out our usual Tuesday practice of sitting out back playing cards. Haven’t really sorted my reaction out yet, but some preliminary thoughts: This is a pretty, pretty movie. A flashback showing a young Clark Kent racing through the […]

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As part of a spate of reading on evolutionary psychology and the emergence of altruism and cooperation, I recently read the forthcoming Philosophy and Primates, based on primatologist Frans de Waal’s 2003 Tanner Lecture, with comments by an array of academic rockstars. One interesting notion floated in Robert Wright‘s contribution is the idea that it’s […]

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Since I doubt the relevant issue will get a MagRack: Christine Rosen, writing in The New Republic, follows in the bold tradition of Michelle Malkin’s “cutting” exposé by rehashing the “libertarian nuttiness of tech-optimists” line Paulina Borsook was peddling six years ago, though mercifully, she doesn’t require a book to do it. It starts in […]

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No, no, I haven’t abandoned blogging forever. My laptop is hosed, and (having managed to get it running off a bootable external HD) I’m devoting way too much energy to learning my way around the OSX Unix shell as I try to figure out how much of my data I can recover. (Doubly a waste […]

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After several years of being on the receiving end of sleazy “why do you hate the troops?” attacks, I suppose I can understand why John Aravosis would be eager for an opportunity to turn the tables, but for reasons Jim Henley lays out pretty well, that doesn’t make it any less of a stupid sacrifice […]

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Mencken famously described puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy,” and the Internet, which seeks to connect everyone everywhere, seems to have provided the ideal instrument for feeding those fears. The FCC levied a record $3.3 million fine on CBS affiliates for airing a suggestive “teen orgy” scene in the show […]

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For the inaugural MagRack, I’ll take a pass at the last ish of The New Republic. As I mentioned before, I’ll just weing through the articles in the order they appear, but this isn’t some kind of summary of everything in the issue (that would be boring); just some quick reactions to the pieces that […]

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Yglesias registers one of his favorite complaints in reply to a recent Jonah Goldberg column: That the political liberal ideal of “bracketing” religious arguments, or arguments otherwise linked to a particular comprehensive doctrine, is misguided because it just pushes people to offer “bad faith” arguments for their views. Which is funny, because over the course […]

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Jim Henley backs up his contrarian contention that X3 is the best of the X-Men films by tackling the most obvious argument against it: That the movie clumsily cobbles together two distinct plot lines—one based (very) loosely on the Dark Phoenix storyline, and another involving a “cure” for mutanthood (continuing the mutant=gay allegory from the […]

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We seem to be having yet another of our occasional, moronic flare ups of that perennial Kabuki fight, the flag burning debate, and today seems like as good a day as any to say something about it. Of course, there isn’t a whole lot to say—it’s a simple enough issue and the ground’s well covered—but […]

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