Last month, I wrote a short piece for the American Spectator in which I argued that the position Republicans have taken on executive-branch spying powers in recent decades is as much a historical accident as a natural outgrowth of conservative principles. I wish that at the time I’d read Kathryn Olmstead’s fine book Challenging the […]

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The University of Texas at Austin has recently made available online the video archives of the old Mike Wallace Interview (complete with Wallace touting the joys of the Parliaments he’s chain smoking throughout). I was especially fascinated by this interview with Salvador Dalí. Oddly, its when Dalí is most cogent and illuminating that Wallace seems […]

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So, my RSS reader routinely presents me with a quandary. A bare minimum of once per day, the Weekly Standard‘s Michael Goldfarb produces a piece of truly stunning hackery audacious even by the standards of partisan blogging. Often, I’m tempted to comment on this. Normally, I refrain on the grounds that it’s low-hanging fruit, and […]

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Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s notion of “Libertarian Paternalism” has already occasioned plenty of blogospheric debate, but their recent LA Times op-ed has reopened the floodgates. Jonah Goldberg has a crop of posts, and Jim Manzi and Will Wilkinson also take shots. I’ve been at least somewhat more open to the idea than some of […]

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Brian Beutler writes: So, by my count, the White House has, at various times, determined that the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments are unacceptable impediments to its violation of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments, and, as such, chosen to wish them out of existence as if they were minor headaches […]

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Remember Enemy of the State? Oversized, sort of silly-but-fun action thriller starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman. (The latter as a paranoid surveillance expert who works out of a Faraday cage in an otherwise vacant warehouse, which is a cute homage, but invites a necessarily unflattering comparison.)  Driving the plot in the background is a […]

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Why?’s Alopecia

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My iPhone now works as a remote control for my laptop anywhere in the house, provided it’s on the same WiFi network. The laptop, in turn, can stream to speakers in the living room hooked up to the router. If I start morphing into Justin Long, you have permission to put me down like a […]

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Buffeted by claims that her campaign cannot hope to overcome “the math” that gives Barack Obama an almost certain lead in pledge delegates as the Democratic National Convention draws ever nearer, Hillary Clinton today struck back, citing the controversial work of MIT mathematician Ian Malcolm as grounds for her supporters to hold out hope. Mr […]

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Genius.

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