The attitude expressed in this column seems to be surprisingly common: The success of the [Iraqi] elections poses a major intellectual-moral-political problem for people in this city. The cognitive dissonance is palpable.[…] Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his […]

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President Bush has made democracy promotion a centerpiece of his foreign policy strategy, but does it live up to the hype? I round up some arguments that it might not in “The Limits of Democratization.”

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So, the Eason Jordan business has come to a close by demonstrating conclusively that if a hundred idiots bay at the moon simultanously, they can force the resignation of a network executive over a preposterous non-story. What’s especially telling, though, is the response we’ve seen to people pointing out that it is, in fact, a […]

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Y’know, I had a niggling sense there was a blog post I’d been meaning to make, and now Yglesias reminds me by beating me to the punch. Ross Douthat’s Atlantic Monthly piece about Harvard contains the surprising (to this philosophy major) claim that “philosophy departments have largely purged themselves of metaphysicians and moralists,” apparently due […]

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Couple days ago, I was walking around with “Sympathy for the Devil” stuck in my head for no particular reason, and paused as I mumbled out these lyrics mid-laundry-fold: I stuck around St. Petersburg When I saw it was a time for a change Killed the czar and his ministers Anastasia screamed in vain And […]

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At the start of a piece on the porn classic Deep Throat, Laura Kipnis muses on Mother Nature’s shocking lack of gender solidarity in arranging things so that, on average, it’s easier for men than women to arrive at the Big O: And let’s not forget the unkindest joke of all, the placement of the […]

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My piece on Alfred C. Kinsey, “Doctor Sex, Ph.D.,” is up at Reason Online.

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I was chuckling along at this brutal review of (from the sound of it) a thoroughly awful erotica author who’s apparently being condescendingly toasted for being a black female author who makes it to the bestseller lists “without any help from Oprah.” But I got an extra special kick, in this context, out of what […]

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I’d sort of hoped to see someone give this moronic Eason Jordan “scandal” the brief puncturing it deserved, and Matt Welch obliges with a nice post this morning. I think some bloggers, especially on the right, have gotten so addicted to the high of feeling like you’ve scooped the lumbering, liberal “MSM” that they’re forcing […]

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Flipping through the new Atlantic Monthly, I spot an ad for an index-fund stock called Spider. The headline promises “the enormity of the S&P 500 in one little share.” Yeah, yeah, I know it’s become synonymous with “large size,” but I still got a chuckle out of it.

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