For a while, I’d just hoped that keeping the kitchen clean and food tightly sealed away would encourage the mouse to move on, but this stratagem backfired: It grew increasingly bold, even venturing tentatively toward the living room occasionally. Finally we broke down and got a trap and… the mouse vanished. Trap unsprung, bait untaken, […]

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Most of the commentary on the Trayvon Martin case has focused on the growing mountain of evidence suggesting that shooter George Zimmerman, far from acting in “self defense,” was the instigator of the confrontation between the two late last month. But I keep coming back to a slightly different question: Are we really supposed to […]

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As you may have already heard, the Brothers Koch have mounted a campaign to take control of the Cato Institute, where I hang my hat. Now, I have a pretty fantastic day job, which basically consists of reading, writing, and speaking about whatever I find interesting in any given week. And I don’t generally subscribe […]

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By way of belated congratulations to happy newlyweds Megan and Peter, I thought I’d reproduce here the short passage I read at the wedding this weekend, and which (with some reservations about “identical in opinions”) fits them to a T: What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in […]

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Brad DeLong, in a spate of bloggy nostalgia, reposts an old reference to something I wrote back in 2005, a bit of a thumbsucker on hedonistic and preference utilitarianisms, and the pitfalls of conflating them.  I’d actually forgotten about the argument—though I soon remembered that I’d been delighted and flattered to find that it attracted […]

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Speaking of assessing people’s productivity in society, I suppose this is as good a time as any to announce publicly that at the end of the month I’ll be rejoining the ranks of the gainfully employed, with the delightfully vague title of Research Fellow at the Cato Institute.  My mandate will be fairly open-ended: Basically, […]

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So, I’m enjoying the opportunity to start doing some freelancing and probably going to take a couple more weeks enjoying the liberty to do a bunch of that. But fairly soon, I’m probably going to have to start looking for something a bit more stable. Since I’m already in DC, since this is where I […]

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This weekend I got to seriously considering whether perhaps I hadn’t better just pack it in and make a fresh start in some less doomed, more remunerative industry—which at present is pretty much anything short of buggy-whip manufacture. Maybe it’s failure of imagination, but to my own astonishment, I realized I was hard pressed to […]

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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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