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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John Derbyshire asks: I want to know why “owning the insult” doesn’t seem to work any more. It used to be a standard ploy—not just “liberal,” but “Whig” (originally “cut-throat cattle rustler from the wild Scottish borders”) and “Tory” (orig. “illiterate Papist peasant from the remotest bogs of Ireland”). Yet nobody could now start a […]

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The more I think about it, the more curious I become about the contents of the secret FISA court ruling first reported by the LA Times, which supposedly sparked the sudden need for reform. The article suggests that the ruling had forced intelligence agencies to treat communications between two parties, both overseas, as domestic surveillance […]

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