Seems everyone, most recently colleague Brian Doherty in The American Spectator, is offering muted congratulations to Dave Sim on the publication of the final, 300th issue of Cerebus, completing a comic book story that began some two years before I was born. Many of the comments are in the same vein as those of (the […]

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I’m as apalled as anyone by Noam Chomsky’s apologies for people like Pol Pot, but I think Pejman Yousefzadeh is off base in this TechCentralStation piece, which takes the linguist-cum-radical-pundit to task for focusing on perceived U.S. wrongdoing when there are so many indisputably heinous abusers of human rights out there. I don’t want to […]

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Jim Henley has written a great piece on the status of the superhero story in American letters.

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Constructive critiques from anyone who attended the Hipublicans panel this week are appreciated.

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Matt Yglesias has a post where he says that slippery slope arguments are often “logically” false but “empirically” correct. This gives me an opportunity to highlight a minor argumentative pet peeve of mine: the conflation of reductio arguments and slippery slope arguments, which are related but distinct—and I think it’s a distinction worth preserving. The […]

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Jon Rowe notes a decision in an intellectual property case [PDF] that pitts comics legends Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane against each other. In addition to whatever legal interest the case may offer, you also get to read Judge Richard Posner explicate—quite accurately—the origin story of Spawn. So now, in addition to law and economics, […]

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Appease this.

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Birthday present from the Sexy Economist™: This framed poster of “The Prisoner,” signed by Patrick McGoohan! And she made an indescribably tasty kiwi-strawberry cheesecake. I think this must explain my affinity for theories of justice that don’t put too much emphasis on desert… (err, moral desert, not the cheescake kind).

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So, conventional wisdom has it that ceding to terrorist demands in the face of attacks—the popular, if oversimplified, gloss being put on the results of the Spanish elections—is poor strategy: It only shows that terrorism is an effective way of getting what you want, inviting more attacks. Well, maybe. If there are a large number […]

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I’ve just gotten back from a trip to Guatemala, where Liberty Fund was holding a conference on Robert Nozick at the gorgeous Casa Santo Domingo, a converted monestary. So I expect to be posting fairly regularly again henceforth—ideally far more regularly than over the past few months. For those of you in D.C., I’ll be […]

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