Jonah Goldberg reviews Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul in the most recent National Review, and I had a few chuckles at this line: Once a voice of restraint and reason, Sullivan now specializes in shrill panic: mercurial ranting full nof operatic arguments, steeped in bad faith, aimed at people he once praised (including yours truly). […]

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Readers of The Weekly Standard will be familiar with its back-of-the-book “Parody” page (always prominently so labeled so you know it’s meant to be funny), which in their October 30 issue consisted of “Kids’ Letters to Barack Obama.” My eyes bulged ever so slightly at this knee-slapper: Dear Senator Obama, I’m a student here at […]

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I’ll confess, as someone who spent the early 80s as a toddler, when I came across the term “Atari Democrats” in the second graf of this American Prospect piece by Jim McNeill, I thought it was a new coinage: The world headquarters of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. is still in Akron, Ohio, but […]

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A woman who was a grad assistant in a class I once took confessed to us that she’d burst out laughing in the previous section when, in the midst of a dialogue about the source of ethics, she queried a student: “So you’re a relativist, then?” To which he replied: “Absolutely!” I mention this because […]

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It’s not online, but the new issue of Harper’s (which I can no longer read without thinking of The Wire‘s Brother Mouzone) has a review by novelist Marilynne Robinson of The God Delusion. There are a handful of interesting but ultimately rebuttable objections, some that seem more solid (e.g. the charge that when there are […]

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In “What a Bleeping Shame,” Jon Last gives an overview of the CleanFlicks decision, which found that companies selling bowdlerized copies of popular movies (but which bought and warehoused one original DVD for each cleaned copy they sold) were infringing copyright. But there are scattered errors, such as: The law takes copyright seriously. It’s one […]

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I expect partisanship from the Weekly Standard, and I expect a partisan magazine’s horse-race handicapping to be colored by a bit of wishful thinking, but there’s a level of hackery past which it becomes impossible to do any useful analysis at all. As a case in point, consider “Will Casey Strike Out?” Purporting to be […]

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For the inaugural MagRack, I’ll take a pass at the last ish of The New Republic. As I mentioned before, I’ll just weing through the articles in the order they appear, but this isn’t some kind of summary of everything in the issue (that would be boring); just some quick reactions to the pieces that […]

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So, I get way too many magazines. And a lot of the time, I have a bunch of little things to say about various articles in one of ’em, but I’m either not sure any of ’em really merits their own post, or I think they might, but I feel somehow silly doing four posts […]

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