Virginia Postrel asks: Personal interests aside, the more fundamental issue is the way we treat the term disease. If something is a “disease,” it is worth treating. If it isn’t a “disease,” you should just live with it. But why? Why not treat a biological condition you just don’t like? Of course, I’m in full […]

[Read more →]

Ann at Feministing had a post last week about the problem—familiar to me because my old college debate partner used to get furious about it—of doctors refusing to perform elective tubal ligations on adult women in their 20s. The thinking, apparently, is that those women are old enough to make the irreversible decision to have […]

[Read more →]

As a legal matter, the case of the North Carolina couple arrested for “flag desecration” seems awfully clear-cut. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly and unambiguously that political speech is constitutionally protected, even if a flag is folded, spindled, or mutilated in the course of making a point. There’s actually something weird and surreal about […]

[Read more →]

When people talk about the cultural power of Pitchfork, they invariably cite its brutal review of ex-Dismemberment Plan front man Travis Morrison’s 2004 solo album Travistan. As Wired reported: According to Josh Rosenfeld, the cofounder of Barsuk Records (which released Travistan), the effects of Dahlen’s review were immediate and disastrous. Several college radio stations that […]

[Read more →]

Jill at Feministe says that a “very questionable” new study which found that obesity can “spread” across social networks makes her feel as though it must be “I Hate Fat People Week.” But isn’t this just an inversion of the very same story everyone pretty much accepts as an account of why some people become […]

[Read more →]

I have no strong view either way on the controversy over whether or to what extent Scott Thomas Beuchamp’s dispatches for TNR were fabricated or embellished, but I think John Podhoretz is right that there’s nothing per se shady about his turning out to be Elle Reeve’s fiancée/husband/whatever. In fact, that’s exactly the sort of […]

[Read more →]

So, Megan blogged a conversation we had earlier today about “one-hit wonder” bands, and the trickier category of the “two-hit wonder,” asking her readers to come up with more instances of the latter. (Don McClean was the one that had sprung to my mind.) Many came up with good examples, but I think others are […]

[Read more →]

It seems like there was some sort of competition earlier this week to pen the most idiotic editorial about the late John Rawls, and it’s a photo finish between Linda Hirshman at The New Republic and David Lewis Schaefer in The Wall Street Journal. Read them, then tremble in contemplation the terrifying fact that these […]

[Read more →]

Dana has a pice at the Prospect on racial essentialism in the Harry Potter books. There are some interesting points in there—about how, for instance, J.K. Rowling makes her villains advocates of a kind of wizardly racial purity, but still bows to the convention of the fantasy genre by making Harry descended from magical nobility. […]

[Read more →]

The American reports on the boom in domestic, and especially local, opera.

[Read more →]