So, one of my jobs at Reason is to be the first (and, fairly often, last) pair of eyeballs on unsolicited article submissions. In case anyone cares, here are a couple things I tend to see over and over that influence whether I pass the submission on for further review. I have no idea how […]

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Mini-debate over in a DCist comment thread about the practice by clubs like the 9:30 Club of doing ticket presales for certain high-demand shows, announced discreetly on their message boards or through the club’s newsletter. Some like the idea of rewarding “rabid fans”; others regard this as elitist bollocks. I see a rationale that doesn’t […]

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Jeet Heer has a nice piece on the intelligensia’s shifting view of comics from the Toronto Star. But it seems there’s something missing here: Since then, we’ve seen an ever-deepening appreciation of the form. Comics are now studied in the academy, archived in research libraries and lavishly reprinted in expensive collector volumes. In one Toronto […]

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Go pick up (or, more likely, download) copies of Beck‘s Guero and The Decemberists‘ Picaresque, both out this week, right away. The first is an all too welcome return to (forgive the oxymoron) eclectic form after the soporific Sea Change, the second a top-notch collection of Brechtian sea shanties, as we’ve come to expect from […]

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Roomie Tim Lee has a piece up at AFF’s Brainwash arguing that Grokster shouldn’t get a free pass under the Supreme Court’s Betamax decision for facilitating piracy by users of its p2p network. Here’s the nub of his argument: [I]n the Betamax decision, the court considered whether the “record” function of the VCR–not the VCR […]

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You can now get The Sorrows of Young Werther as they doubtless would’ve meant to be read if Goethe had broadband: in daily e-mails.

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The catch is that she won’t be there: Marie Gryphon, is headed back down to D.C. this summer and looking for someone who wants to swap digs—she’s got a well appointed pad up in Cambridge, Mass. near Harvard. Follow the link and drop her a line if you’re interested.

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I’m having an argument with Will Wilkinson in the course of which a little thought experiment came up. I’m curious what others think. Take the following scenario: Suppose an impenetrable black cube lands on your lawn. Simultaneously, you receive a message from God telling you that the cube is conscious, and contemplating the nature of […]

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With apologies to some perfectly lovely people I know who work there, I’ve decided that so long as the Washington Times preposterously insists upon referring to gay “marriage” in scare quotes, I’ll adopt a parallel practice with respect to that “newspaper” and the “journalists” it employs.

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Ryan Sager‘s excellent recent articles on the delicious contradictions of the movment behind campaign finance reform are required reading. But for precisely that reason, I’ll figure folks have read them (if not: go ahead, we’ll be here when you get back) and jump off on a tangent. In this post, Ryan notes that CFR boosters […]

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