Hmm, I suppose this is what I get for passing on secondhand information from a book I haven’t myself read or fact-checked. The rigorous Mark LaRochelle, who I knew from the forums on Free-Market.Net writes the following: I am a big fan of Julian, but I have been stewing about this for a couple of […]

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So earlier I linked to the game at the Donnie Darko website. I first thought it was just the three obvious levels there, and a frankly pretty simple game which didn’t do much beyond testing whether you could remember certain words— the “passwords” sparrow, smurf, breathe, and rose. As far as I can tell via […]

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Remember how, back when the 9th Circuit ruled that the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance by public school teachers violated the establishment clause because of the inclusion of the phrase “under God?” Remember how the usual broken records wigged out and compared it to an attempt to remove “In God We Trust” from our […]

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A friend emailed me the following after my post below on Donnie Darko—the song “Mad World,” which I mentioned there, plays over a montage scene of the sort she describes. A lot of movies have songs with this certain quality (delicate-melancholy-cadence-kind-of-thing) playing over scenes in which the camera pans to each of the main characters, […]

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As those of you who know me probably know, my first name isn’t really “Julian,” strictly speaking. My real first name is “Miguel,” after my father. Julian is a middle name, taken from Gore Vidal’s novel about the emperor Julian the Apostate, who attempted to revert the Roman Empire to Hellenic paganism after Constantine converted […]

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The phrase “blog community” takes on a new meaning as communitarian don Amitai Etzioni gets a blog. Incidentally, Etzioni was at Cato yesterday for this excellent forum on culture and globalization with Benjamin Barber and Tyler Cowen. I was actually forced to raise my estimation of Barber, but Cowen’s case for the cultural benefits of […]

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Josef Stalin died 50 years ago today. While historians still debate whether the cause was a brain hemmorhage or foul (some would say “fair”) play, I think we can all agree that it was an occasion to celebrate. Though Stalin never quite “achieved” (if you can call it that) Hitler’s status as the ultimate symbol […]

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Radley links an unintentionally hilarious website sponsored by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and designed to make beef seem hep to teenage girls. Yes, I’m serious. No, this is not a setup for some Nabakovian punchline. The site is called “Cool-2b-Real.” I guess the industry’s typical advertising tended towards the macho, and they figured they […]

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Writing the piece below, I recalled that the time I missed that midnight showing, I had meant to go check it out with Todd Seavey, who I’m convinced was separated at birth from Glen Whitman. One day they’ll meet and the universe will implode. Anyway, if you’ve travelled in Manhattan libertarian circles, you might know […]

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This weekend, I finally got around to seeing Donnie Darko at a midnight showing at Visions, after having missed another midnight showing in New York this summer. It’s the sort of movie that’s made for midnight showings. Visions has reviews which describe it as “what Ferris Buellerâ??s Day Off might have been if David Lynch […]

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