For reasons wholly unclear to me, the awesome, awesome Colorado-based band Dressy Bessy is perpetually playing backstages and tiny venues in D.C. They’ll be at DC Nine this Sunday, and are much better than you’ve got any right to expect to see in a joint that size.

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So I’m hoping I might harness the distributed genius of Teh Internets for a long-term project I’m working on. I’m looking for stories that fit the following description: A big group—maybe a whole society, maybe an organization within it, like a corporation or government agency—is involved in doing something that’s not just morally wrong, but […]

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My friend Rachel Kramer Bussel has a new Village Voice column on resurgent feminist fretting about “unladylike” behavior, which is well worth reading. For an opening line, you can’t beat: “Ladies, be warned: Your pussies are causing the downfall of society.” (Though maybe an attention-grabbing lede was the only way to yank readers’ gaze from […]

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“White House Agrees to Review of Surveillance Program,” says The New York Times, while The Washington Post‘s headline reads “Bush Compromises On Spying Program.” Something there strikes me as a bit surreal—as though a president’s deigning to permit constitutional review of a massive NSA program of warrantless eavesdropping were an act of noblesse oblige—but according […]

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A fascinating article over at MSNBC reports on how data gleaned from observing quasars has led some scientists to conclude that some physical “constants” like the speed of light or the electron’s charge may not be constant after all. As one of the scientists interviewed in the article notes, this presents a sort of Quinean […]

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About a year back, I wrote about a copyright safe-harbor Congress had created to protect companies that create Bowlerized versions of Hollywood movies for consumers who prefer their entertainment extra wholesome. The catch, however, is that the protection applies only to services that don’t create any “fixed copy” of the G-rated version. So selling a […]

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I should probably self-impose some maximum percentage of blog posts I devote to poking fun at stuff at National Review, but I can’t resist commenting on George Gilder’s essay “Evolution and Me” from the most recent issue. (Subscriber only, but mirrored at the Discovery Institute.) It’s an impressive farrago of hoary old creationist canards (Darwinism […]

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Apropos of Brian Doherty’s reportage on the tensions between “purists” and “reformers” in the LP, I see that the arbiters of purity over at LewRockwell.Com ran at least three articles on that theme last week: “In Defense of Libertarian Purity,” “Principles,” and “Evicting Libertarian Party Principles.” Each seems to be built on a premise that […]

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All good geeks are familiar with Star Trek’s Borg, a species of cybernetic organisms who lack all sense of individuality, linked in a collective hive mind. While I think some of the various Trek novels have offered origin stories (not considered “canonical”), none of the TV shows or movies have offered an explanation of where […]

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Glenn Reynolds can’t grok how nouveau-Julian Dave Weigel, writing at Hit and Run, can escape the massive cognitive dissonance that, apparently, ought to be involved in believing both that it’s fine for The New York Times to name the town in which Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney vacation, and that it’s dirty pool for irate […]

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