MoJo Blog highlights an odd passage in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Brendan Miniter (perennial Luigi of the Brothers Miniter): Although advocates of same-sex marriage will deny there is any connection to extending the institution to gay couples, a recent report released by the National Center for Health Statistics reveals why this debate is […]

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I’ve got a cover story on search technologies out in the new issue of Reason currently out on newsstands. You can pick up a hard copy, get a digital subscription, or wait a month or so for it to be available free online. But really, do you want to be that far behind the curve?

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You know, back in the day, Stan Milgram had to spend painstaking weeks creating passports to mail out to a “random” sample of Americans just to provide John Guare with play titles. Now, all a grad student has to do is write up a little blog post (and, in fairness, a script to mine Technorati) […]

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A post at Feministe—in which Zuzu tears into a poster at Firedoglake (justifiably enough in the instance) for employing a prolonged and severely unfunny whore metaphor to attack a female political opponent—takes a few lines in passing to condemn the use of the epithet “cunt” against hated pundits who happen to have one. I think […]

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Oh, Heritage, Heritage, Heritage, whatever shall we do with you? In the latest effort to portray abstinence education as the best thing for teens next to a radioactive spider bite, Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson argue that teen abstinence is linked to higher academic achievement. I find this plausible enough on face, although note that […]

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There’s a scene in the (very good) movie Shattered Glass in which a pair of New Republic staffers are heard chatting briefly at a party as another character walks through. (Whether the viewer’s takeaway is supposed to be that D.C. 20-somethings are monomaniacally focused on wonkery or glibly snobby or both I’m not sure.) The […]

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Via Dinosaur Comics.

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The latest Harper’s Index (not yet online) includes the claim that a male child becomes 33 percent more likely to be gay for each (full biological) older brother he has. Science News apparently reported the finding over the summer. The fact that the connection holds only for biological older brothers suggests that the cause here […]

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Missed this last week. from Robert A. George: There’s something painfully ironic about Trent Lott being named “minority whip.”

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So, I’ve had my primary laptop chugging away with Disk Warrior (booted from CD) trying to fix a hosed 150g external drive for something like 11 days now. It’s up to over 6,600 “overlapped files” found, but gives no hint of how much of the drive it’s actually checked. Any tech gurus out there have […]

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