If you’re into the disarmingly straightforward, upbeat rock of John Roderick’s Long Winters, you really ought to buy or download their new album, Putting the Day to Bed, which was released today. I’ll confess, I had some reservations after listening to their Ultimatum EP. You know how some bands are really hampered by the studio […]

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If a libertarian had written this New York Times op-ed as a piece of Swiftian satire, I can only assume it would have been regarded as ham-handed and over-the-top. But barring some recent and little-publicized reversal of ideological polarity, I’ve got to suppose quondam presidential aspirant Mike Dukakis and UCLA prof Daniel Mitchell are in […]

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Holy hell, I agree with Stanley Fish, here writing on the controversy over a University of Wisconsin prof who peddles his pet theory that George Bush planned 9/11 to his students: Both sides get it wrong. The problem is that each assumes that academic freedom is about protecting the content of a professor’s speech; one […]

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Andrew Sullivan approvingly cites a recent John Tierney column (mirror) on federal funding for stem-cell research: Even before this week’s veto, anger over the ban has prompted states and private philanthropists to put up their own money. They’ve committed well over $3 billion to this research in the next decade, which might be more than […]

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First, a shoutout to America’s Future Foundation: Apparently I filled out some questionairre that put me in a drawing for an engraved iPod nano, and won. (I went with “Life without music would be a mistake” for the inscription.) Thanks AFF! Well, it arrived this morning, and as I was running through picking out a […]

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…but I am, in fact, going to go check out tonight’s performance of Bartleby (pace Melville now photocopier rather than scrivener), which is part of the ongoing Capital Fringe Festival. Come along tonight, or wait for my canary-in-a-coal-mine report. Meanwhile,DCist has been flooding the Fringe Festival zone, and having read their review of Short Works […]

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A reader notified me that, as of the late 90s, the state of Texas has had an official state molecule. It’s Buckminsterfullerene, better known as the “Buckyball,” first discovered at the Lone Star State’s Rice University. And a few years back, it was discovered to cause rather dramatic brain damage in some animals at pretty […]

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation yesterday won permission to lawsuit against AT&T, which has been aiding the NSA by siphoning off information about communications passing through its networks for pattern analysis. You can read the full decision, listen to a conference call with EFF attorney Cindy Cohn, or check out Orin Kerr’s analysis of the ruling. […]

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Oh dude, Chris Muir just doesn’t know when to save himself some embarassment and toss it in. Half a dozen bloggers, Andrew Sullivan among them, point out that his bizarro reference to “Kantian Nihilism” (and, equally weird, the United States being “based on” the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, born 1788) just betrays incredible ignorance. Muir […]

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A couple days ago over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen asked for examples of “counter-signalling,” in which some social signal is imbued with the oppostite of its usual meaning. The classic example is the head of a big company coming to the office in jeans and sneakers, in effect saying: “I’m so high status, I […]

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