I’m afraid I’ve turned on TypeKey registration for the blog; the waves of comment spam were getting too obnoxious, and even a pretty good internal filter wasn’t catching everything. Apologies for the hassle.

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I just want to get this on the record now, before it’s conventional wisdom: At the end of the most recent Harry Potter book, one mystery left unresolved is the identity of a certain “R.A.B.” who (so as not to spoil the ending) let’s just say appears to have betrayed Lord Voldemort in a pretty […]

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Libertarians usually assume that even people who seem eager to limit the freedom of others at least want it for themselves; I wonder whether that’s really the case in “Save Me From Myself!”

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When a use of language is described as “Orwellian,” usually the speaker means that obfuscatory or euphemistic terms are deliberately being used for political purposes to hoodwink listeners. But Orwell was also always concerned with the corrosive effects of merely sloppy language. A case in point is the ambiguity in the terms public and private. […]

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I found myself arguing the justice of international trade with a few leftish college students last week (and was slightly horrified to discover that it’d been so long that some rather elementary economic points took rather longer than they ought have to rouse from their slumber in the corners of memory). One allowed that foreign-owned […]

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Now, I’m as weary of smug blog triumphalism as the next guy, but good lord is this Doonesbury strip clueless. Gary Trudeau speaks via his radio host character (whose name escapes me) reporting from “the tail end of the media’s fascination with blogging.” Which is probably a fair description only in the same sense that […]

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It was nice to see my old friend Rhys Southan at this weekend’s Koch Fellow reunion—and to be reminded that I’d meant to link his blog Beat Jeremy Coon. See, Rhys and Jeremy graduated from the same high school the same year, both aspiring filmmakers. Well, Jeremy was the producer of Napoleon Dynamite, and Rhys […]

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We’ve been updating the bio pages and article archives of Reason staffers, which means that my archive is actually up to date now, including stuff from the print mag.

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Aww, they’re so cute! (Hat tip: Boing Boing)

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Via a circuitous route, I came across an old post by Paul Hsieh explaining why he agrees with the Catholic (i.e. West Coast) Objectivist position that it’s not halal for good Randians to make common cause with—or, indeed, be seen in the general vicinity of—libertarians. Paul offers a parable in which a surgeon is offered […]

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