In the wake of the disastrous Couric interview with Sarah Palin, even the hacks are voicing concerns about their rising star–cum–shooting star.  But since removing her from the ticket, even by the transparent expedient of having her “voluntarily” withdraw to “spend more time with the family,” would be at least as disatrous as keeping her […]

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I finally picked up the collected trade paperback of Warren Ellis’ Black Summer, only to discover that my American Prospect cover story from last year, which discussed Black Summer as part of the trend of post-9/11 politicized comics, is quoted on the back cover. As a longtime and, let’s just say highly committed fan of […]

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I’m bemused at the way we’re perpetually told the fundamental cause of the ongoing meltdown is Wall Street “greed,” as though that somehow counted as an explanation. How, pray, would we describe it if mortgage lenders had rejected many more applications from lower-income folks, on the grounds that they were poor risks? Well, greed, of […]

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Remember waaaay back when I did that vlog interview with Doug Wolk about his fantastic book Reading Comics?  Well, we actually had a pretty long and (I thought) interesting conversation, only a few minutes of which ultimately made it into that vlog.  And with Reading Comics having picked up an Eisner over the summer, it […]

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Fleeting thought spurred by anticipation of Built to Spill doing Perfect from Now On at 9:30 Club tomorrow: This apparent trend of long-running indie bands performing classic albums in their entirety (Mission of Burma doing Vs. at Black Cat a while back was stellar) is presumably partly a function of a new generation discovering seminal […]

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I know there’s a measure of FISA-exhaustion out there, but it’s worth keeping an eye on the looming constitutional fight over the FISA Amendments Act—or, as I prefer to call it, in homage to the epic rivalry between James Tiberius Kirk and Khan Noonien Singh: “FISAAA!”  I’ve got a writeup at Ars with a summary […]

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I’m sure everyone else has seen this by now, but since I only just got it:

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What I thought would be a quick writeup of a press conference announcing a new wiretap suit ballooned into a rather lengthy analysis of the surprisingly tricky quesition of when a communication is “intercepted” or “acquired” by a government device. Check it out at Ars. The rest of the writing I’ve been doing there this […]

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Back in June, a throwaway post about the alleged equivalence of porn and adultery spawned an almost absurd amount of blogospheric discussion. Well, I see the shambling corpse of that debate is still lumbering through the Internets, though in this case it takes the form of two very smart porn-friendly posts at Culture11’s new “Ladyblog”.  […]

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