The AP reports that Army suicide rates have hit a 26-year high, a result that should not be enormously surprising to anyone who looked at the report released by the Pentagon’s Mental Health Advisory Team back in May. The risk of mental health problems for troops increases with longer deployments, and as tours of duty […]

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You’ve probably seen this happen—or, if you’re less lucky, been the person it happened to. A group of people are standing around discussing some topic where either expertise or native intelligence make them all pretty conversant on the subject. Suddenly, one person pipes up with what he clearly thinks is a profound insight, an important […]

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Kerry Howley on the senatorial semiotics of fuck-me boots.

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Via Tech Liberation Front, privacy expert Susan Landau has an important Washington Post op-ed on how an expanded wiretapping infrastructure might make it easier for hackers to eavesdrop on us. As Landau points out, this is not hypothetical: We know that even the most top-secret government networks have been breached in the recent past. The […]

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Andrew Sullivan’s prose equivalent of a single-finger send-off for Karl Rove resonated with me: Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times. He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war – and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term […]

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GamePolitics offers this transcript from a Larry King interview with “Dr. Phil” from shortly after the Virginia Tech killings: You cannot tell me – common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become […]

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Dave Weigel’s coverage of the Ron Paul campaign is the best bit of journalism I’ve read coming out of the Iowa Straw Poll.

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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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