An Egyptian appeals court has upheld the jailed blogger’s four year sentence. Now supporters seem to be pinning their hopes on a presidential pardon. That’d have a certain poetry, as one of the charges against Kareem Amer, accounting for one year of his sentence, was calling Hosni Mubarak a “symbol of tyranny.”

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The New York Times considers whether playing the lotto is “irrational.” Money quote: Addiction researchers and some economists struggle to explain this behavior, describing it at best as an irrational fever, and at worst a pathological addiction to a regressive, government-run numbers game. But researchers spend little time in corner-store lines. “The people who denigrate […]

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It turns out that when you give law enforcement sweeping powers to demand access to private records with minimal oversight, you get lots of abuses. A Justice Department audit of the FBI’s use of “national security letters” surveyed 293 such letters from 77 casefiles and found 22 potential breaches (at least one in almost a […]

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A German brother-and-sister couple are fighting to have their country’s incest laws overturned. Will Saletan’s summary: Details: 1) They were raised separately. 2) They met when he was 23 and she was 15; they began living together a year later. 3) They have four kids. One has epilepsy; two have “special needs”; three have been […]

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Alfred Kinsey earned the permanent ire of social conservatives with his (in)famous groundbreaking studies of Americans’ sexual behavior—the first of which clocked in at number four on Human Events’ list of the most dangerous books of the past two centuries. And in fact, they’re probably right to think that Kinsey at least helped to erode […]

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The D.C. Circuit Court has struck down the District’s handgun ban as a violation of the Second Amendment—which, crucially, they interpret as an individual right. Glenn Reynolds has a roundup.

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Yeah, yeah, Captain America is dead. As Agent Brand from Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men said about Jean Gray’s demise, which occurs about twice a year, “Yeah, that’ll last.” The editors at Marvel are already refusing to rule out a resurrection, which is the same as guaranteeing it. Even Aunt-Fucking-May can’t stay in the […]

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Back in 2003, The Wall Street Journal described Ann Coulter as “the Maureen Dowd of conservatives.” (I’m pretty sure I coined the abbreviation MoDoCon, which increasingly seems far too mild for Coulter, except that I expect it’d piss her off more than any other epithet one might pick.) Now, via Mother Jones, I see The […]

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I see that (praise from Caesar!) Jeff Goldstein has some nice things to say about my January Reason story, allowing that I’m occasionally cogent when I’m “not acting like a polemicist for privacy absolutism.” Now, I recall arguing with Jeff about the NSA program on an Internet radio show once, so presumably he’s aware my […]

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The new Amon Tobin album is awesome. That is all. UPDATE: Ok, this is pretty cool. Have a listen:

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