Like Feministe, I’ve always found it a little odd to read nominal progressives in the blogosphere offering attacks like… well, I’ll just quote: Jeff Goldstein is a paste-eating ‘tard. Ann Coulter is an anorexic cunt with an Adam’s apple. Hey Michelle Malkin, me love you long time! Something else I’ve noticed, that may explain what’s […]

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One lazy evening in my misspent hippie youth, I was puttering about the house when a striking spoken word performance came on the radio—I think it was probably Vin Scelsa‘s old Idiot’s Delight show, but I’m not sure. It was the unmistakable, gravelly voice of Lou Reed doing an updated Romeo and Juliet over dissonant […]

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Ross Douthat has some thoughts in reply to last week’s posts by “Mittens” Yglesias and myself about abortion and the conditions of personhood. (Old-timers may recall a long debate on just this topic I had with Eve Tushnet back in—oy, has it really been that long?—August 2002.) Now, Ross says that “any serious pro-lifer” would […]

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So, I’m reading an interesting book due out in the fall from Princeton called The Altruism Equation, about the search for the evolutionary origins of altruistic behavior, and a section dealing with the influence of Thomas Malthus got me thinking about fertility trends and inequality. It’s a pretty well established fact that both within and […]

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As promised below, since I wouldn’t want Ramesh Ponnuru to come away from the aftermath of his first book with the impression that supporters of abortion rights can’t do any better than to mimic Leon Kass, it’s worth trying to take a look at the sort of arguments he makes and seeing what kind of […]

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Like plenty of other people, I was duly amused to read John Derbyshire’s stinging review of his National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru’s new book The Party of Death. (Perhaps a way of restoring karmic balance in the wake of NR‘s decision to commission a review of their own senior editor’s book, which struck me as […]

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This post over at TPMCafe about the folly of supposing that a “most blogged about” article is apt to be particularly important (or well written or, well, accurate) got me thinking about an embryonic idea I’d tossed out here some time back in the context of academia. There’s a monetary phenomenon in economics described by […]

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So, I get way too many magazines. And a lot of the time, I have a bunch of little things to say about various articles in one of ’em, but I’m either not sure any of ’em really merits their own post, or I think they might, but I feel somehow silly doing four posts […]

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I was once again invited to do my civic duty by going through the Brazil-esque process of juror selection at a courthouse in downtown D.C. today, and I found myself thinking of a quandary my friend Baylen Linnekin faced last year. A commited anti–Drug War activist, he’d had an opportunity to serve on a drug […]

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As Rick Santorum takes the floor of the Senate to remind us that a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is really about showing contempt for the sodomites, a who’s-who of conservative scholars (of whom, one can’t help but note, only a few seem to be social scientists) try a more respectable tack via the Princeton […]

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