Kriston joins in the bien pensant fulmination against an apparent trend of libraries pulling classics off the shelves to make room for popular shlock, with a little tweak for his libertarian friends thrown in at the start: The state, employing its monopoly on violence, coercively collects hard-earned citizen tax dollars and funnels them into moratoriums […]

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As will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, I’m one of those people about grammar. I will arch an eyebrow if you say you feel “nauseous” when you mean “nauseated.” I still refuse, in what I recognize is an utterly futile gesture, to use “hopefully” except as a description of someone’s mindset. […]

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This week’s New Yorker reprints an excellent Nobel lecture by Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who took this year’s literature prize.

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Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr takes one commenter’s remarks on the treatment of Jose Padilla as an occasion to assert that “sarcasm is not an argument”: The problem with sarcasm is that it pokes fun at the other side without actually making an argument. If you happen to agree with the speaker’s view already, […]

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A post at Feministe—in which Zuzu tears into a poster at Firedoglake (justifiably enough in the instance) for employing a prolonged and severely unfunny whore metaphor to attack a female political opponent—takes a few lines in passing to condemn the use of the epithet “cunt” against hated pundits who happen to have one. I think […]

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I just polished off Chuck Klosterman’sKilling Yourself to Live, which somehow manages to be as good as you’d expect it to be if it were actually about its nominal topic. See, in theory, it’s about the deaths of rock stars, and Klosterman’s trip to the sites thereof, which would (if done right) make for an […]

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Well played, James Wolcott, well played. Dinesh D’Souza’s forthcoming book The Enemy at Home looks to be amply deserving of the execration Wolcott heaps upon it. The publisher’s own description—replete with the ever revealing attempt to make some vacuous distinction between freedom (good!) and the “abuse of freedom” (bad!)—makes it sound like an almost heroically […]

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I appear to have been tagged by the esteemed, and now officially out of his “early” 20s, Dave Weigel: 1. One book that changed your life? Well, given what I’ve ended up doing with my life, I guess Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, which is what I recall as getting me started thinking about political […]

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I wish I could detest Chuck Klosterman. Liking him feels obvious, a kind of demographic obligation—as though I’d watched that Nissan commercial where “Gravity Rides Everything” plays in the background and realized I really want a minivan. If mad Brazillian geneticists had plugged the vital statistics about myself and my ten best friends into some […]

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With Marty Peretz of The New Republic in the dock on a charge of producing overwrought prose, I’d normally be ready enough to serve as witness for the prosecution, but Jack Shafer’s attempted takedown in Slate charges in without probable cause, even if there is a good chance Peretz has Bill Buckley’s contraband thesaurus stashed […]

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