Proof of my raging man crush on Chuck Klosterman: I eagerly devour even his columns about football—in this instance a meditation on our attitudes to steroids in football. (HT: Baylen) On the one hand, he notes, for all our hand-wringing about individual athletes who get caught juicing, the public manages to “regularly watch dozens of […]

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So, I agree with the general gist of this

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You’d think churning out farcical, desperate attempts to demonstrate some empirical harms of gay marriage would be a full-time job for Stan Kurtz. But he seems to be taking up a sideline in churning out farcical, desperate attempts to demonstrate the harms of atheism now too. Over at The Corner, Kurtz argues that if Russia […]

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Dennis Prager’s preposterous hissy fit over congressman-elect Keith Ellison’s desire to swear his oath of office is a nice illustration of John Stuart Mill’s argument that sometimes it’s useful to have wrong and misguided ideas aired, just because it forces us to more cogently articulate the correct ones, as Eugene Volokh ably does. (You can […]

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Andrew Sullivan quotes a reader making the familiar point that drug prohibition often seems to be motivated less by a concern for the harms of addiction than by sheer puritanical terror of pleasure. It occurred to me that as often as we invoke that impulse, I’d never thought much about its origins. But it makes […]

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The video below, in which Richard Dawkins interviews totally-not-gay-purchaser-but-not-user of-crystal-meth-from-studly-masseurs Ted Haggard, has been making the blogospheric rounds as evidence of Haggard’s looniness. (By the way, have you got your Pastor Ted T-shirt yet?) But while I essentially agree entirely with Dawkins on the substance of the argument here, I find myself reacting to the […]

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Crooked Timber‘s Henry Farrell disagrees with the core thesis of the Will Wilkinson article on status competition that I linked the other day. Sure, Henry argues, there may be an ever-growing number of associations, activities, and subcultures within which we measure our status, but these are themselves part of a Great Chain of Being along […]

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John Hood at The Corner cites a recent Brookings report in support of the familiar conclusion that American students are far more confident in their math abilities than students in other countries who do better on average. Indeed, across countries, there seems to be an inverse correlation between average confidence in math ability and average […]

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BoingBoing posts about an intriguing new academic book on Rumor Psychology, whose authors find (among other things) that “most workplace rumors are 95 percent accurate.” But I wonder whether publicizing that figure might not have the paradoxical effect of reducing that accuracy rate. That is, maybe rumors tend to be so accurate at least in […]

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A couple days ago over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen asked for examples of “counter-signalling,” in which some social signal is imbued with the oppostite of its usual meaning. The classic example is the head of a big company coming to the office in jeans and sneakers, in effect saying: “I’m so high status, I […]

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