Did the Ancient Greeks unlock the secret of screwy Supreme Court decisions? I make the case in “A Heap of Precedents.”

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My first reaction to a recent exchange between Brad DeLong and Will Wilkinson was simple befuddlement. In response to Wilkinson’s (I thought unexceptionable) assertion that people value things other than—and often more highly than—happiness, DeLong objected, not just that Will had said something substantively wrong, but made some kind of semantic error, asserting a tautological […]

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Kriston Capps replies to my smoking ban column from last week with his own taxonomy of smoking ban proponents. I posted in the comments there, but figure it’s worth reiterating one point here. I wrote: It’s not obvious why choosing to accept whatever risk is entailed in being around second-hand smoke is inherently different from […]

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The resolution of the Michael Jackson trial has reminded me of the old (and surprisingly good) Sega Genesis game Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker. Browsing through a couple descriptions, though, I was reminded of an aspect of the game I’d forgotten about: The object in each level, you see, is to touch all the small children. (Thereby […]

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National Review‘s blog The Corner posts (presumably with approval) some truly heroically stupid thoughts from a reader in reply to a New York Times piece on genetics and politics that’s generating a lot of discussion. Sez he (and you may rest assured it’s a he): But perhaps the best evidence is the gender divide in […]

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I did a spot about the proposed D.C. smoking ban on The End of Politics, a radio show on the local Fox affiliate, on Sunday evening. You can listen in RealAudio format here.

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Reason’s Burton Gray intern for the summer, Dan Koffler, has a smart blog: Finnegans Wake. (Which, if you share Tim Cavanaugh’s opinion, will be more rewarding than the book.)

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I’ll be on the WMET AM 1160 show The End of Politics this coming Sunday night around 8:10 pm to talk about the looming D.C. smoking ban. Folks outside D.C. can listen online at the link above.

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The fight over the D.C. smoking ban has been strikingly Manichean, despite the broad range of compromise options that would address many of the concerns of anti-smokers without stamping out all smoking bars. I look at why the banners aren’t interested in diplomacy in “Cold Turkey Canard.”

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Probably those of you who don’t daily pore over GAO reports don’t care, but dear lord, who writes the soporific headlines for Government Accountability Office studies? They all have exactly the same structure, and they’re almost entirely uninformative. If the Department of Foobar is doing pretty well, the headline will say: “Progress at DOF, but […]

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