This may be my favorite response yet to my comics article: The author doesn’t seem to have understood much of what he read, but man is he hilariously angry about it.

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It’s probably pointless to link to specific clever strips of the geektastic Web comic xkcd—it’d be easier to just add a feed posting each day’s strip automatically—but since I’ve got comics on the brain, I figured I’d note that this recent strip is a clever mini-commentary on the way the medium depicts time spatially, a […]

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   I can’t be the only one who saw the creepily Mickey Mouse–ish masks worn by riot police in Tblisi and immediately started humming the theme from Brazil. But thinking about one of my favorite movies also brought to mind the following exchange from the film, which now seems disconcertingly familiar: Jill: Doesn’t it bother […]

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My American Prospect story “The Revolt of the Comic Books,” previously behind the subscriber firewall, is now available online to the hoi polloi. Though since the online version lacks the abundant and lovely illustrative comic art that accompanies the print edition, it’s still worth looking for a physical copy at your newsstand. Update: Ezra has […]

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From The New York Times‘ coverage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act: The Democrats also carved out a blanket exemption for religious groups, drawing the ire of civil liberties advocates who argued that church-run hospitals, for instance, should not be permitted to discriminate against gay employees. The civil liberties groups wanted a narrow exemption for religious […]

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I’ve got a post up at TechDirt, where I’ll henceforth be contributing occasionally, about John Ashcroft’s recent op-ed defending telecom immunity for cooperation in extralegal wiretaps.

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Slashdot posts an essay by a fellow who used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program to offer micropayments to folk willing to argue with him—which I’d have thought was unnecessary in an age when blogs are awash in folk happy to argue for free. The argument, incidentally, is quite terrible: 1. Government should ban smoking by people […]

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For those of you who didn’t grow up (or have small children) in the 80s, the reference at the close of the previous post is to the cartoon Care Bears. The Care Bear Stare was a sort of deus ex machina the magical furballs could employ when faced with some insuperable obstacle: They’d line up […]

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I’m not sure why Ezra Klein thinks it’s especially significant that studies don’t find obvious academic benefits accruing from D.C.’s voucher program in its first year of operation. Yes, the greater flexibility enjoyed by private actors is one part of the argument for choice, but the real core of the argument is about the market […]

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I’m mostly—but not wholly—inclined to agree with McMegatron. Excepting Republican elected officials, the idea that vocal homophobes are motivated by their own latent homosexuality is usually spurious, and it’s unhelpful on numerous levels to act as though “well, I bet you’re a big queer” is an effective response to such people. I stop short of […]

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