Graeme Wood’s Atlantic cover story “What ISIS Really Wants” has attracted plenty of  attention and controversy, spurring several interesting responses as well as quite a few less illuminating ones.  Here’s the core claim many readers want to contest, or even condemn as a kind of smear against Islam: The reality is that the Islamic State […]

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As recently as a couple years ago, “political correctness” was one of those phrases that triggered a reflexive eye-roll from me: Sure, it was a thing in the early 90s, but had long since morphed into a tedious gripe typically voiced by folks chagrined that nobody finds their racist jokes funny anymore. Lately, though, even […]

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One of the more useful thought experiments I’ve encountered in philosophy, because it seems to apply to so many situations, is Derek Parfit’s “Harmless Torturers,” from his celebrated book Reasons and Persons: The Harmless Torturers. In the Bad Old Days, each torturer inflicted severe pain on one victim. Things have now changed. Each of the […]

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Like most of my friends, I think Arizona governor Jan Brewer was probably right to veto SB 1062, which as Reason‘s J.D. Tucille writes, was less a “blow against big government” than a “homophobic stunt” designed to signal official approval of anti-gay animus, while creating a special class of associational rights for people who justify […]

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Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin recently unleashed some righteous fury on the “steaming turd of an opening line in David Streitfeld’s otherwise serviceable New York Times piece about […] gender discrimination in Silicon Valley.” The offending line: “Men invented the Internet.” The thing is—and hold the rotten fruit, I’m going somewhere with this—that’s actually pretty accurate. […]

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Matt Yglesias points to recent research questioning the oft-asserted link between early childbearing and later poverty: Kearney and Levine used data on miscarriages to isolate the impact of giving birth from background characteristics that may contribute to a decision to give birth. When used this way as a statistical control, the negative consequences of teen […]

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There’s a widespread sense—of debatable historical accuracy, but widespread all the same—that we’re living in an era of especially pronounced political polarization, with a correspondingly poor ratio of tribal slogan slinging to meaningful democratic deliberation.  One possible explanation for this is that the massive explosion of our media ecosystem makes it increasingly possible for us […]

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Sanford police are pushing back in the face of public criticism, saying that witnesses have corroborated George Zimmerman’s account of his fatal encounter with Trayvon Martin. Given how many salient facts about the case seem to have been missed in the initial investigation—Zimmerman’s history of arrests for violence, the failure to test the admitted shooter […]

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The weekend, a depressing number of supposed Hunger Games fans expressed attitudes ranging from surprise to undisguised racist hostility at the discovery that black actors had been cast to play the characters Rue and Thresh in the movie. As more attentive fans were quick to point out, these reactions were not only ugly but obtuse: […]

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Writing at The American Prospect a few weeks back, Patrick Caldwell expressed puzzlement at the view, seemingly widespread on the right, that the hegemonic forces of secularism are somehow forcing believers out of the public square: When I first read Santorum’s comments though, I was mostly struck by how off base his statement is from […]

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