The ineffable Will Wilkinson (except, one supposes, by the nominal “Will Wilkinson,” allowing him to be at least briefly effed) has a fine piece in Aussie mag Policy on the trendy “arms race” attack on status competition. Reader’s of Will’s blog will recognize the basic argument: You can’t trust any schema that treats status as […]

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So, the current spate of articles about Barack Obama’s presidential prospects all seem to make at least a passing reference to how weird it is that a guy whose political experience is a stint in a state legislature and less than one term in the Senate has suddenly become the Great Half-White Hope of the […]

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I just polished off Chuck Klosterman’sKilling Yourself to Live, which somehow manages to be as good as you’d expect it to be if it were actually about its nominal topic. See, in theory, it’s about the deaths of rock stars, and Klosterman’s trip to the sites thereof, which would (if done right) make for an […]

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So, being a huge Halloween geek, I’m often willing to put in more effort than makes any real sense on assembling a costume. This year’s required sending a jacket to a tailor in Baltimore, who made the alterations I needed and sent it back via USPS “Priority Mail” a week ago. Baltimore, for those of […]

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Matt McIntosh over at Catallarchy serves up a question that I think is supposed to count in favor of psychological egoism: Now say some clever scientist, considering him a danger to society, knocks out our sociopathic subject and plants a small device in his head — call it the Artificial Conscience ââ??¢ — that will […]

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Excepting maybe Kanye West, basically all the hip-hop I like is at least a decade old: Fugees, Digable Planets, old Tribe, RZA’s GZA’s Liquid Swords album, that sort of thing. I’ll tap my foot to the odd 50 Cent song if I’m out at a bar, but I’m probably not going to buy it and […]

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Lawrence Lessig links to a blog post and

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Over in the L.A. Times, Jonah Goldberg gets around to conceding that the Iraq war was a mistake, and goes on to make a sound point, with an illustration that underscores his point nicely—but not in the way he intended: In the dumbed-down debate we’re having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This […]

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John Hood at The Corner cites a recent Brookings report in support of the familiar conclusion that American students are far more confident in their math abilities than students in other countries who do better on average. Indeed, across countries, there seems to be an inverse correlation between average confidence in math ability and average […]

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It’s things like this L.A. Times article on social conservatives clamoring for a “pink purge” of gay Republican staffers that make me wary of political outings that folk like John Aravosis seem so keen on, quite apart from my general feeling that people’s private lives shouldn’t be dragged into the public eye just to score […]

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