I wish I could detest Chuck Klosterman. Liking him feels obvious, a kind of demographic obligation—as though I’d watched that Nissan commercial where “Gravity Rides Everything” plays in the background and realized I really want a minivan. If mad Brazillian geneticists had plugged the vital statistics about myself and my ten best friends into some […]

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Life is full of tradeoffs: One of mine (deep emo sigh, all together now) is that a weekend trip to NY/NJ precludes my seeing Beauty Pill—cobbled together from the remnants of one of my old faves Smart Went Crazy—play at Black Cat on Saturday. If you will be around this weekend, you should consider it […]

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Any journalist or writer can tell you that there are few experiences more apt to provoke the desire to shoot yourself in the face than that of flipping open the latest issue of some national magazine only to realize that some notion you’d been absently tossing around with your friends for six months—or worse, one […]

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I’m back from Guatemala, and while I obviously didn’t get to post all that material I so coquettishly hinted at before leaving—technical difficulties, among other things—stay tuned for that and mayhap the odd rumination on the trip itself.

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One of my favorite tech policy blogs, the Technology Liberation Front, has inexplicably decided to surrender any claim to be taken remotely seriously. The anti-science mujahadeen at the Discovery Institute, in a classic (for them) play, had opened a tech policy shop with the rather transparent goal of lending their crackpot ideology some sort of […]

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I’m headed off to Guatemala this morning for a Liberty Fund conference, which paradoxically means a likely increase in blogging, since I’ll have a few hours of plane and airport time with which to finally sit down and knock out a gaggle of posts that have been sitting half-completed for the last couple days. Which […]

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Via Tbogg, I feel compelled to link this faux “tough-minded” post on the hard necessities of killing kids in war not primarily because it’s creepy, or as a case study in glib rationalization, or even for the entertainment value of watching some Socrates manqué fantasize about dominating an imaginary female interlocutor. No, those are all […]

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The folks at The American Spectator giddily report on the revelation that some of the key intelligence relied upon in foiling the recent London bombing plot was obtained by torture in Pakistan. Conclusive refutation, say they, of the argument that in addition to being inhuman, torture doesn’t work. But I think they seriously misapprehend that […]

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I’ve got a short piece up at The American Prospect‘s website today: A look into the mind of George Bush as he grapples with a classic of existentialism.

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Kevin Drum and Josh Marshall both reflect this week on their sense that they’ve become more angry and intemperate over the years as the shadow of George Bush darkens over the nation. I know the feeling. The intriguing thing is how the President’s dwindling claque of defenders have reacted to the growing agitation and rage […]

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