Atrios guest-blogger Echidne responds to George Will’s latest column, in which he argues that the proper minimum wage is zero, with a post that… well, let me just let this line speak for itself: Why not allow the minimum wage be negative? Workers could pay the employers. There is nothing magical about the number zero, […]

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Sorry, I’ve been playing with different ways to make commenting less onerous without having everything swamped by spam, and have apparently let a ton of stuff languish pending moderation. I’m approving those now, and will try to figure out some better way to handle this. Sooner or later, I’ll try to get a CAPTCHA installed […]

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Kriston joins in the bien pensant fulmination against an apparent trend of libraries pulling classics off the shelves to make room for popular shlock, with a little tweak for his libertarian friends thrown in at the start: The state, employing its monopoly on violence, coercively collects hard-earned citizen tax dollars and funnels them into moratoriums […]

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Current Musical Obsessions: Paper Television by The Blow (thanks Ygz!) and Citrus by Asobi Seksu, who will be gracing our very own Rock and Roll Hotel later this month.

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One response to my post the other day on free will (or the nonexistence thereof) seems like a good illustration of a phenomenon I think I’ve noted in this space before, which I call “the shadow of faith”: It is the vehement assertion that there is no God, coupled with a vague worry that you […]

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You know what I love? When people I used to date do awesome things—like, for example, launching a local citizen journalism site that then gets bought out for a tidy sum by the incumbent newspaper in the city it covers. Not, mind you, because I am a big-hearted person who takes intrinsic joy in their […]

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As will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, I’m one of those people about grammar. I will arch an eyebrow if you say you feel “nauseous” when you mean “nauseated.” I still refuse, in what I recognize is an utterly futile gesture, to use “hopefully” except as a description of someone’s mindset. […]

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Ramesh Ponnuru reminds us exactly how weird the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act is: What was the sequence of events? If [the woman described in a New York Times story] had fully delivered the child and then killed it, even at 18 weeks, then that wasn’t a clandestine abortion, and it wasn’t something that would have […]

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Gentle reader, meet the Alien Lighter, recently rescued from safekeeping at my father’s house in New Jersey. This little piece of kitsch is, believe it or not, one of my most valued possessions; read on and learn its secrets. I first met the Alien Lighter as a freshman debate geek at NYU, by way of […]

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I meant to post about this a while back, but back I was home in the scenic New Jersey suburbs for Thanksgiving, I caught an episode of Law and Order that I ended up puzzling over for a bit. As it was blessed with neither competent acting nor a particularly compelling script, I’ll just stick […]

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