From the American Spectator blog: It’s very fortunate for our side that the Democrats are so tightly wedded to socialism and big, international schemes of governance. It’s what keeps us together. I remember standing around with a couple liberal friends in the wake of the last presidential election joking about how it was a good […]

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I went to see Ronald Dworkin speak on Tuesday about his new book Is Democracy Possible Here?, about which I’ll presumably have more to say once I’ve actually read it. One thing that struck me, though, had to do with his principle of “equal concern,” which is one of two he thinks should structure all […]

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I appear to have been tagged by the esteemed, and now officially out of his “early” 20s, Dave Weigel: 1. One book that changed your life? Well, given what I’ve ended up doing with my life, I guess Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, which is what I recall as getting me started thinking about political […]

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Well, I’m late to the papal party, but with the consolation that I can at least outsource some of what I might have said earlier to fellow Wagnerite Jacob Levy. Conrad has one of his characters in Heart of Darkness opine that Kurtz “would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party– Any party.” […]

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I feel certain that someone, somewhere deep in the bowels of your sizable enterprise got through the August issue of Detective Comics and thought: “Dear sweet Jesus, the idea of The Riddler as an egomaniacal ‘consulting detective’ is way too good to waste on some one-shot; this should be a whole series!” This is a […]

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So, I saw a screener of the Sundance-darling documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated with Kerry last week—and my first thought was “not so much rated as overrated.” There are many good points about the capriciousness and opacity of the MPAA rating system, but it’s probably a better op-ed than a film. I’d have […]

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So, here’s an interesting scam (or probable scam) I noticed just a few minutes ago. I’m sitting in a free WiFi cafe in Adams Morgan called Tryst. Their open network is, creatively enough, called “tryst.” But I’m also detecting an ad-hoc computer-to-computer network called “tryst.” And if, as happens every couple hours here, the main […]

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Hi. My name is Julian. (Hi, Julian!) And I’m addicted to Veronica Mars. With that admission out of the way, here’s one thing I find bizarre: The casting directors for a show set in California can’t seem to find anyone, for any of the various Latino roles, with a passable Spanish accent. I’ll give them […]

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I’ll confess some mild disappointment with Amartya Sen’s recent book Identity and Violence. It is, as Philostrate might’ve put it, some 200 pages long, which is as brief as I have known a book, but by 200 pages it is too long. The core idea—that we need to see people as “diversely diverse” rather than […]

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Somehow or other, I never did get around to putting

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