I’m generally a lot closer to Hilzoy than Ross Douthat on abortion questions—and in particular, agree with a fair amount of her dissection of his recent column on the subject. But on one point, I think they both get it wrong. Ross wrote: The argument for unregulated abortion rests on the idea that where there […]

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Perhaps because more people have had time to actually read the speech by now, the effort to brand Sonia Sotomayor a racist on the basis of one decontexualized line from a talk seems to have simmered down.  The “softer” line is that she’s apparently “obsessed” with race and gender issues. By way of Steve Benen, […]

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It’s scarcely news that Hollywood has spent much of the last decade mining the comics pages for inspiration—and little enough surprise that they should, since comics narratives  have already proven they will work visually, and often come with a a built-in fanbase. Yet as the Watchmen film proved, the most formally brilliant works invariably lose […]

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Peter Suderman’s post on why, in the present context, Republicans should be a little less Twitterpated and a little more focused on old-fashioned blogging seems exactly right to me. A better way to circulate soundbites is great, but right now the party needs to work on churning out some actual substantive ideas that it can […]

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I attended some of last week’s Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, and had the following thought after an excellent panel discussing the necessity of reforming the atavistic Electronic Communications Privacy Act. As privacy buffs well know, the law sets a fairly high bar for acquiring or intercepting the “contents” of a user’s communication—the audio of […]

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While I expect it’s cold comfort to Publius, I suppose Ed Whelan should get some modicum of credit for realizing—however belatedly—that his “outing” of his pseudonymous interlocutor was wrong. I might have gone with something stronger than “uncharitable”—”crass” and “petty” spring to mind—but let’s face it, a second-thought and an apology are so rare in […]

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I’m somewhat heartened to see a near-unanimous chorus of disapproval, across ideological lines, for Ed Whelan’s petulant, adolescent “outing” of the (formerly) pseudonymous blogger Publius.  Though he complains about “smears” and “misrepresentations” and “irresponsibility,” Whelan’s real beef seems to have been that Publius—now revealed as associate law prof John Blevins—said some unkind things about him.  […]

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Much as I hate to admit it, and much as I regard the vast majority of people pushing the “Internet makes us dumber” line as vacuous douchebags, this seems about right. Addendum: A commenter objects that the Internet is not displacing more “worthy” activities (reading Proust, socializing) but merely providing a new way to do […]

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I’ve been binging on TED talks these past few days, among them a 2002 lecture by Daniel Dennett on memetics. Most of what he has to say is by now pretty familiar to anyone with a scintilla of interest in the topic, but I was intrigued by the analogy he offered up between contemporary globalization […]

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It’s that time again.

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