They must call it “spin” because of the uncanny ability of the hawk message-crafters to pivot on a fucking dime. Old Line: Iran’s defiant, ongoing pursuit of nuclear weapons necessitates George Bush’s bellicose policy of preemption. New Line: Reports that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago validate Geoge Bush’s bellicose policy of […]

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I meant to comment on something Matt Yglesias linked last week: A Washington Post report on recent psychological research suggesting that power tends to stunt empathy. You might call this another instance of researchers confirming conventional wisdom—”power corrupts.” But there’s a still more general lesson that might be drawn from this and a raft of […]

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No, I’m not talking about IMing in Raymond Chandler speak, fun though that is: It’s an insanely addictive little game in which you attempt to block the cat from leaving the board. A number of the starting positions look as though they ought to be formally unwinnable, but the cat AI is sort of dumb, […]

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In light of the resurgent fuss about race and IQ sparked by Will Saletan’s Slate columns, I may as well weigh in on the side of those who think this is just a largely unfruitful topic, at least for the popular press. I have no idea whether there are any average genetically-rooted intelligence differences between […]

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I’m no McCain fan, but I think I want that on a T-shirt.

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In lieu of actual original blog content for today, you might check out a couple of my recent posts at Techdirt: One on Megan Meier and “open source rough justice,” another about the legal history bearing on recent reports that law enforcement officers are often able to track the physical location of cell phones without […]

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Kerry Howley writes about handwringing in the UK over proposals to allow lesbian couples to more easily avail themselves of IVF technology, the putative objection being to the creation of kids who are “fatherless by design.” As Kerry points out, this sloppily conflates the situation of kids growing up in single parent homes (which are […]

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I can’t tell whether James “PoMoCon” Poulos is appalled or just bemused by Russian nostalgia for the Soviet era, in the form of high-priced hipster tees featuring communist iconography. But while it’s a bit unsettling to see the symbols of one of history’s bloodiest regimes treated like a Thundercats logo, I’m nevertheless generally delighted to […]

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From Jeff Jacoby’s recent Globe column: Blind opposition to war that seems lost is understandable. But can Democrats be so invested in defeat that they would abandon even a war that may be winnable? I’m not sure why there’s such a tone of shock in that second sentence: Of course a war might be winnable […]

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Stephanie Coontz, whose excellent history of marriage I reviewed a while back, makes the case for less state involvement in matrimony in today’s New York Times. She points out that the government’s central place in marriage is both relatively recent and has an unappealing history.

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