I only just noticed that Richard Rorty died late last week. I can’t say I was hugely in sympathy with his general program, but Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is highly accessible and well worth reading.

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Dave Weigel spots a… telling line in Michael Medved’s prose aneurysm in response to a new California policy of allowing conjugal visits between gay inmates an their partners: Gay conjugal visits should cause the public to look past platitudes about love to focus on the raw actuality of male-male eroticism. Close the newspaper and just […]

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Will Wilkinson links an interesting new study of how Germans of various political orientations differently value money and status. Jonah Goldberg, in passing, offers this: Germans, it seems to me care more about status than Americans do. I don’t know whether this is true or not, but it does seem a little odd to see […]

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Ygz is creeped out by Caitlin Flanagan’s description of a social networking site for the Spongebob set: What fun they had! Club Penguin is a cute, happy virtual world in which you create an adorable little penguin in whose guise you can travel to all sorts of fun spots and play video games (making pizzas […]

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It was long a favorite hawk trope to accuse anyone with reservations about various “innovative” policies—indefinite detention without trial, warrantless wiretapping, crusades to remake the world by force of arms—of being trapped in a “September 10th mind-set.” I don’t know whether he’s the first to use it in this way, but Andrew Sullivan has a […]

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Slate nails the allure of the Ocean’s X movies: Only the first is even approximately watchable as a story, but they’re all fantastic as “luxury brands.” A smarter distributor would release DVDs with a special feature allowing you to keep the excellent David Holmes soundtracks rolling, but mute the dialog—that’s how they ought to be […]

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Jim Henley dissents from the oft-heard libertarian complaint about hipster appropriation of Soviet iconography, which typically comes in the form of the observation that nobody would dream of trying this with Nazi imagery. I think it’s worth stressing that it’s not communism that’s exceptional here, but Naziism: Its resistance to our tendency to turn everything […]

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If you don’t mine choking down a heaping helping of bloombast, there’s an intriguing suggestion at the heart of this Policy Review essay by Mary Ebserstadt: The well-known correlation between religiosity and family size should be interpreted not (just) as evidence that religious belief or participation induces people to have more children, but rather as […]

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Via Obsidian Wings. Addendum: The author of this one is blogger and philosophy grad student Greg Gates.

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To coin a phrase: Heh.

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