Since my Cato Unbound essay name-checks Isaiah Berlin (at least in part as an excuse to make a bad headline joke), this is a good opportunity to circle back to an interview in with Francis Fukuyama in New Perspectives Quarterly that I’d meant to link when it first appeared. Apart from some musing on the […]

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Randy Barnett has a, well, rather odd op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal. Barnett is anxious to point out that Ron Paul’s strident anti-war stance is not shared by all libertarians, nor required by libertarian ideology, because it “would be a shame if this misinterpretation inhibited a wider acceptance of the libertarian principles.” WIth upwards […]

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Posting will probably be light this week, as I’m in Manhattan for the Kirov production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met. Intriguingly, they’ve decided to give the operas an Egyptian gloss—which works out nicely, since my father, with whom I’m seeing them, is an amateur Egyptologist. (I’m glad I was born during his Roman […]

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My contribution to the current Cato Unbound roundtable is up. Brink Lindsey led off with an essay on “The Libertarian Center.” Jonah Goldberg and Matt Yglesias have already weighed in.

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My friend Emily passes along a report in The Washington Post of a highly unusual hold-up at a Capitol Hill dinner party. When an armed robber burst onto the back patio and demanded money, a woman improbably nicknamed “Cha-Cha” replied that, as they were just finishing dinner, he should join them for a glass of […]

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F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “Echoes of the Jazz Age”: Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early […]

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Burning Man chronicler Brian Doherty responds to the news that the iconic counterculture festival, which has traditionally made a point of officially eschewing commerce, will be allowing a few corporations to exhibit (unbranded) “green” technologies this year. Predictably, even this quite mild step has elicited carping about “money changers in the temple.” And Brian offers […]

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Kelly Jane Torrance on Philip K. Dick: A quarter-century after his death, he is finally considered not just a serious American writer but one of the century’s greatest. At least, that’s one conclusion to be drawn from Dick’s inclusion in the Library of America: the first science-fiction writer to be so canonized in what is […]

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How in the name of all that’s good in holy did Gordon Jenkins win a Grammy for best instrumental arrangement on the September of My Years version of “It Was A Very Good Year“? Is there any more dramatic example of an excellent song, beautifully sung, and utterly ruined by cheeseball, overdone, easy-listening strings? I […]

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New York Post film critic Kyle Smith on Ratatouille. Now, where have I heard that before?

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