Well played, James Wolcott, well played. Dinesh D’Souza’s forthcoming book The Enemy at Home looks to be amply deserving of the execration Wolcott heaps upon it. The publisher’s own description—replete with the ever revealing attempt to make some vacuous distinction between freedom (good!) and the “abuse of freedom” (bad!)—makes it sound like an almost heroically […]

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So, uh, apparently someone at Wonkette was browsing through the old Halloween party photos stored at my Facebook profile. (Yes, I have a Facebook profile. Yes, I am probably far too old to have a Facebook profile. It’s new-media research. Or something.) Anyway, sorry Matt. For the record, he’s a pirate.

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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is riled up about the apparent ideological litmus test implicit in the Columbia University Teachers College Conceptual Framework. At first blush, I can see why. Inter alia, it apparently stipulates that students will have a commitment to “social justice” (normally a euphemism for redistribution) and agree that: [S]ocial […]

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I’d meant to mention that I went to check out Built to Spill on Monday, despite having been pretty disappointed with their live show on previous outings. But, as they’re one of my four or five favorite bands, I rather strongly wanted to believe my previous experience was aberrant—and I’m glad I gave them another […]

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I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this here before, but since this view seems to be conventional wisdom to a lot of smart people I know, it probably won’t hurt to repeat myself and reiterate what I just wrote in the comments to this post over at TAPped. Responding to Sen. Jim Talent’s position that […]

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OK, last thing from Dawkins, I swear, but this is one of those little factoids that has been around forever, and still seems to be making the rounds. Maybe you’ve seen it: If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally […]

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A line of argument in the new Dawkins book struck me as curious: He’s going off on the notion that morality requires religion, and tries to make a distinction between “absolutist” ethical systems, which he allows also includes Kant and other deontologists along with most monotheistic religions, and what he regards as a healthier, non-absolute […]

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An article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend considered a proposal to pay poor folks for “good behavior”—things like staying in school and on the right side of the law. I’ll confess, I couldn’t get one line from a certain (distinctively non-worksafe) Chris Rock routine out of my head: “What do you want, […]

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So, having decided to go with Batman villain The Riddler for my halloween costume (the green-question-mark-blazer-and-bowler-hat version, not the original spandex catsuit one or the more recent tattooed metrosexual one) I’ve been paying more attention than usual to various kinds of puzzles and brainteasers. Two of which I’m fond, for those of you who are […]

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Remember logical positivism? If you weren’t a philosophy major in college, quite probably you don’t, since it cropped up around the time of the first World War, and was pretty much dead by the second. It was an anti-metaphysical school of philosophy that sought to pare down the proper domain of rationally meaningful propositions to […]

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