I seldom read individual issues of comic books any more, and when I do read comics, they usually aren’t the same mainstream spandex-and-superpowers titles that enthralled me as an adolescent. But if the recent one-shot X-Men: Endangered Species is representative, the genre is evolving in promising new directions. While it’s actually manga that are leading […]

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I got to see the fabulous new Pixar movie Ratatouille earlier this week, and have to report that A.O. Scott’s strikingly effusive review is pretty much justified. But it also makes it even harder to credit director Brad Bird’s denials that he was influenced by the philosophy of Ayn Rand, something many reviewers inferred from […]

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I’ve bitched about this before, but I find few things as tedious as legal analysis that reduces Supreme Court decisions to some hackneyed “people versus the powerful” cartoon. Especially when it yields what ought to be guffaw-inducing laments that a recent ruling interprets “the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause — which was adopted for the express […]

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Remember Max Headroom? The stuttering, digitized alter-ego of telejournalist Edison Carter (both played by Matt Frewer) starred in a short-lived but often brilliant eponymous TV series that first introduced a cyberpunk aesthetic to a mass audience. In many ways—enough to fill a separate blog post—it was shockingly prescient. But in one central way, the world […]

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Forgive me while I play catchup, especially as I expect others have already made this point, but the commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence, while obviously meant to tread a kind of middle ground, seems less defensible to me than an outright pardon would’ve been. The only way to spin this as anything other than […]

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Ron Paul supporters will be staging a short rally at the Mayflower Hotel on Friday at about 12:15, when the candidate will be recording an interview with George Stephanopoulos for The Week. E-mail this guy if you think you can make it out.

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The more astute among you may have noticed something subtly different about the blog this past week—viz, no posts. I’ve been off camping, and without the sporadic Internet access I had imagined I’d find time to trek into town for most days. But I’m back, and your regularly scheduled posting should resume momentarily.

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