Aeon Skoble, editor of and contributor to several of those Your-Favorite-TV-Show-and-Philosophy books, jumps into the fray in the comments to this Crooked Timber post to defend their value. Others are skeptical. My own take: Great idea in principle, for many of the reasons Skoble mentions. But, on the basis of the ones I’ve looked at, […]

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“You’re so arrogant,” a friend recently chided me, “you don’t even realize you’re arrogant.” Probably true, but at least I’m not alone, according to this Scientific American piece by Michael Shermer.

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Responding to my post below, Radley makes the familiar (and valid) libertarian point that private certification services could take the place of state assessment of a restaurant’s sanitary status. He also makes an inapt comparison to the argument for smoking bans, which it’s worth getting out of the way first. As opponents of the smoking […]

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TISATAAFICC

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I just happened upon a handy feature at the D.C. Government website: Notices of food establishment closures. I was mildly grossed out to see that over the course of the last year, places at which I’ve occasionally eaten were cited (and temporarily shut down) for “evidence of rodents on the premises” and “basic inadequate sanitation.” […]

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Dodgeball is a nifty-looking service that works with social networking services like Orkut or Friendster. You use your mobile phone to text-message the service with the information that you’re headed to this bar or that club. It notifies your friends on the service, and lets you know of any friends-of-friends within a 10 block radius. […]

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Radley Balko notes this hilarious correction slated for tomorrow’s New York Times: Yesterday, the Times identified a man on page A21 as a Ku Klux Klan member found guilty of murdering a black sharecropper. Actually, the man was Pete Coors, head of Coors Brewing Company, and a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Coors is […]

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Matt’s not happy that I’m not happy about this whole conscription thing. First, on the charge of advancing a specifically Rawlsian formulation as definitive of “liberalism,” I suppose I’ll plead guilty. But it’s not as though the idea of citizens enjoying an inviolable (or, anyway, near-inviolable) sphere of individual autonomy is some kind of innovation […]

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Reader Brian Chase clues me in to the fact that a director for the planned Watchmen movie has been chosen. A few years back, the brilliant Terry Gilliam (of Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Twelve Monkeys fame) had been involved with a project, and lots of us were disappointed when that didn’t […]

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I’ve got a piece up at Reason on the company American Apparel, and on socially-conscious consumption more generally. Some of the comments on the piece make me think I got the emphasis a little wrong: It wasn’t really meant as an attack on AA. I like their clothes fine, and I engage in the same […]

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