…or is $2 per mixed drink actually the baseline tip now? (Outside Manhattan, I mean—they have their own weird rules.) I’d been under the impression that $1/drink was more or less standard; now I’m wondering whether I’ve been gradually accumulating the seething hatred of all the booze-slingers at my local bars.

[Read more →]

The first single off Spoon‘s forthcoming album is out. (Thanks Laure!) It’s good stuff, though also feels like a clear departure from their last few albums, sounding a bit like a B-side from a New Wave band fronted by Steve Reich. (I actually had to go check Wikipedia to make sure drummer Jim Eno wasn’t […]

[Read more →]

I enjoy the occasional popcorn novel as much as the next guy, but am I the only one who cringes slightly at the number of candidates for the presidency who are reading crap?

[Read more →]

I used to both relish and dread the occasions when Tim Cavanaugh would come to DC for a few nights of carousing with Reason honcho Nick Gillespie: It was invariably, by turns, bewildering, intimidating, and hilarious. Imagine sitting between Waldorf and Stadler from the old Muppet Show, cranked up on amyls and early Spy slinging […]

[Read more →]

I was scanning Paul Krugman’s column on trade today (evil TimesSelect firewall) and got to wondering: Is there a looming battle between populist opponents of free trade and natalists? Any successful natalist policy, after all, is going to generate a certain number of Surplus Americans relative to the next generation that would have existed absent […]

[Read more →]

This ThinkProgress post is just odd. It asserts that Bob Novak wants to distract our attention from how it’s “a failing on President Bush’s part to have staffed his administration with “subpar people he brought up from Texas” to positions far above their competence levels. His crafty means of diverting attention from this fact? Going […]

[Read more →]

The Washington Post has published an op-ed of truly magnificent stupidity (and, incidentally, gratingly twee prose) today, decrying the platform the Internet provides for anonymous speech: In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. […]

[Read more →]

This may just be the strangest anti-drug PSA ever.

[Read more →]

In the aftermath of a few well publicized rape/murder cases in New York last year, I wrote that I found it somewhat unsettling how quick some folks were to decry as “victim blaming” or “slut shaming” any suggestion that these ought to serve as tragic reminders that, for instance, there are parts of Manhattan where […]

[Read more →]

Diane Rehm, who I hear once had pretensions of being a journalist of some kind, conducted a maddeningly uncritical, borderline fawning interview with drug warrior Joe Califano on her program today. My expectations at this stage are actually pretty low. I didn’t expect Rehm to probe terribly deeply into Califano’s dire warnings about the terrifying […]

[Read more →]