Via Wired News, I learn of a truly inspired concept: Baker Street’s biggest brain takes on the disciples of Cthulhu in a Conan Doyle–Lovecraft mashup of a game called Sherlock Holmes: The Awakening.

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My weekend post positing a possible inverse relationship between a city’s average attractiveness and the prevalence of stranger-flirtation in bars prompted a few responses, from Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy, Heather, and Glen Whitman. And to clarify for Glen: Yep, my implicit assumption was that in a high-average-attractiveness city, people will tend to have more […]

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A solid column by Sebastian Mallaby looks at our strange double standards about pioneering entrepreneurs in areas like technology and in the much-maligned world of hedge funds.

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The folk at PowerLine (and elsewhere) are incensed by a recent Time interview with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The premise behind the complaints would appear to be that if you’re going to print the thoughts of a world leader who also happens to be a reprehensible thug, you must fulminate like an A.M. radio host throughout […]

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The comments on a recent post by Dave at Hit and Run, jumping off Jim Henley’s got me thinking about the perennially bemoaned fact that we have a large class of pundits who specialize in making predictions and projections, that many of them seem to have a near infallible knack for getting things grievously wrong, […]

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Spencer’s had a redesign.

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In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell famously tagged a plethora of “ready-made phrases” that the lazy writer—I include myself here—will often be tempted to employ to do his thinking for him. (I’m hoping Stanley Fish’s blasting PatEL as “the most overrated essay in the modern canon” will immunize me from the observation that invoking […]

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My friend Heather’s post on some stereotypes about D.C. dating provoked a thought that, while probably wrong, was at any rate amusingly counterintuitive enough that I’ll repeat it here. She’s not persuaded by the claim that D.C. women are especially unfit or unattractive (depends on your comparison city, doesn’t it?) but agrees with the notion […]

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One thing the left and right appear to agree on, but which seems sorely lacking in good supporting arguments, is that there’s something deeply wrong with people making tradeoffs between health or longevity and money. For instance, I posed a hypothetical to a smoking-ban supporter earlier this week: Suppose we had “smoking variances” that bars […]

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