Ygz is creeped out by Caitlin Flanagan’s description of a social networking site for the Spongebob set: What fun they had! Club Penguin is a cute, happy virtual world in which you create an adorable little penguin in whose guise you can travel to all sorts of fun spots and play video games (making pizzas […]

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It was long a favorite hawk trope to accuse anyone with reservations about various “innovative” policies—indefinite detention without trial, warrantless wiretapping, crusades to remake the world by force of arms—of being trapped in a “September 10th mind-set.” I don’t know whether he’s the first to use it in this way, but Andrew Sullivan has a […]

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Slate nails the allure of the Ocean’s X movies: Only the first is even approximately watchable as a story, but they’re all fantastic as “luxury brands.” A smarter distributor would release DVDs with a special feature allowing you to keep the excellent David Holmes soundtracks rolling, but mute the dialog—that’s how they ought to be […]

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Jim Henley dissents from the oft-heard libertarian complaint about hipster appropriation of Soviet iconography, which typically comes in the form of the observation that nobody would dream of trying this with Nazi imagery. I think it’s worth stressing that it’s not communism that’s exceptional here, but Naziism: Its resistance to our tendency to turn everything […]

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If you don’t mine choking down a heaping helping of bloombast, there’s an intriguing suggestion at the heart of this Policy Review essay by Mary Ebserstadt: The well-known correlation between religiosity and family size should be interpreted not (just) as evidence that religious belief or participation induces people to have more children, but rather as […]

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Via Obsidian Wings. Addendum: The author of this one is blogger and philosophy grad student Greg Gates.

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To coin a phrase: Heh.

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The FTC is making a move to halt the planned assimilation of Wild Oats markets by the Whole Foods collective, on the grounds that it would raise prices for consumers. This seems unlikely for precisely the reason cited in the article linked above: Whole Foods isn’t just competing with other organic food stores, it’s competing […]

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Glenn Greenwald is rounding up examples of conservatives who are now protesting that the president isn’t one of them, but who took just the opposite view back when Bush-43 was a moniker rather than an unrealistic goal for his approval ratings. Fair enough, especially when it comes to the people now carping about the immigration […]

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Even by the prolix standards of Unfogged, there’s a huuuuuge comment thread at this post on the news that bookies have stopped taking bets on whether teen wizard Harry Potter will live or die in the final book of his series, as the bets are all but unanimously against his survival. (Opinion is so dramatically […]

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