Brooklyn’s A Place to Bury Strangers are playing the cozy Black Cat backstage on Wednesday night, for the preposterously low price of $7. You can check them out at the link above or download a mini-album gratis. If you’re planning on hitting the AFF Happy Hour with economist and terrifyingly-erudite culture maven Tyler Cowen (of […]

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A little while back, I heard a band that introduced me to a new and particularly tragic category of artistic badness: They were exactly good enough to suck. What I mean is that they were just barely, slightly, asymptotically over the threshold of minimal talent, past which musicians are condemned to be judged by ordinary […]

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I don’t think there’s any serious disagreement that the sudden rise of the blogosphere these past few years has corresponded with an equally dramatic spike in the currency and prevalence of libertarian ideas. Like the impressive growth rates that only Third World economies can achieve, this is in large part just a measure of their […]

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We hear constantly about how very, very obese Americans are supposed to be—both statistically and in the form of anecdotes about foreigners identifying American tourists by their girth. And while I hadn’t explicitly put it to myself this way, I had always, I suppose, taken this with a grain of salt because it was out […]

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Various folks are linking a New York Times piece on how the frequently-reported disparity in the average number of male and female sex partners is mathematically impossible. Maybe I’m missing something here, but while it’s clearly impossible for the (heterosexual) mean to be different, there’s no strictly mathematical problem with the median being different—which is […]

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Atrios spots a groan-inducing summary of the provisional government’s approach to the Iraqi economy in this Reuters article: [Paul Brinkley, deputy under-secretary of defense for business transformation in Iraq,] said early economic planners had made the understandable mistake of assuming that a free market would rapidly emerge to replace what he described as Saddam’s “kleptocracy”, […]

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Ross argues that Hitch is reading the Harry Potter books through a godless glass, darkly: It’s true that the Potter novels aren’t an explicitly Christian fantasy in the same sense as the Narnia books (although Christian themes and motifs abound in Rowling’s universe); what they assuredly are, though, is a series in which the central […]

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Rove’s resigning? Did someone buy the White House an Atlantic subscription? Update: And reporting from Planet K-Lo: By leaving, Rove could be doing his last bit of service to the president: If it’s a successful last year, the myth of “Bush’s brain” may be laid to rest. I can’t even conceive the kind of deus […]

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I’m inexplicably tickled to see that the flower vending machine at the Raleigh-Durham Airport gets its own Web page.

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I’m on a Tech Liberation Front podcast about the FISA amendment and surveillance.

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