OK, the deluge of comment spam was getting out of control, so I’ve resorted to turning on Typekey authentication. Apologies for the hassle, but it should only take minute to sign up, and many different blogs use it.

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I see that University of Texas musicologist Phil Ford, with whom I’ve corresponded a bit in the past about our shared Wagner fetish, has launched a group blog, Dial “M” for Musicology. He’s just finished a series of posts on the Canadian Opera‘s production of the Ring Cycle, which, enviably, he attended.

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I was reading Will Saletan’s most recent piece (on conservatives and contraception) and got to thinking about two arguments with the same basic structure: Contraceptives and abortion lower the expected costs of sex, such that many people will be more willing to have more sex with more partners than if these things didn’t exist. In […]

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So, as I’ve mentioned previously here probably, I’m working on a rather largish project that I guess you could describe as a popularization of a lot of current strains of moral psychology. And the way I’m setting it up, while there will be a series of different narratives and illustrations woven throughout, tying together different […]

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It’s a couple years now since former Reagan administration econowonk Paul Craig Roberts astonished his free-trading erstwhile allies by collaborating with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on an anti-outsourcing New York Times op-ed that was rapidly and roundly condemned as an embarassing farrago. I checked in with PCR’s latest jeremiad on the topic mostly out of […]

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This weekend featured an always-welcome visit to D.C. from my old friend Rhys, who I see too infrequently, as he’s one of those that friend friends everyone needs, if you know what I mean. At all events, seeing him reminded me that he’s got an excellent sort of one-man-incubator blog called IdeaProvince where he stores […]

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I’ve been thumbing through Richard Dawkins’ slightly curmudgeonly but generally interesting new book The God Delusion, which doesn’t add a great deal that’s new to the debate over theism (is there anything new to add?) but is, at any rate, a nice roundup of the relevant arguments, even if the tone makes me skeptical of […]

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I’d meant to say something about last week’s debate at Campus Progress over Barry Goldwater, with my friend Dana Goldstein defending her soft spot for the late Arizona senator and Brown student Justin Elliott ridiculing the idea that Goldwater’s legacy contains anything for progressives to admire. I tend to think they both rather miss the […]

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One more thought from the Dworkin panel mentioned in the post below. Apparently, in Dworkin’s new book, he lays out a case, grounded in human dignity, for a strong presumption against the use of torture—so strong that it should be thought of as a kind of “trump,” obviating any kind of cost-benefit calculation on a […]

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You may have already seen the story making the blogospheric rounds about the Texas art teacher whose contract was cancelled because (she claims) parents complained after she took her fifth grade class to a museum containing bare naked marble—in particular Rodin’s “Shade,” Malliol’s “Flora,” and the, uh, not exactly pornographic “Star in a Dream by […]

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