Yglesias, as is his infuriating gift, makes one of those points that seems glaringly obvious only after he’s said it. To wit: If you assume their goal is to persuade people to agree with them, the “New Atheist” strategy of being an enormous douchebag seems counterproductive. Since folks like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, even […]

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About a year back, I floated the idea of things that are “exactly good enough to suck.” Things that fall into this category—writing, music, art, whatever—are just barely of sufficient quality to get judged by the appropriate “serious” standard (professional journalism, a “real” band), by which standard they fail miserably. If they were only slightly […]

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Back in June, a throwaway post about the alleged equivalence of porn and adultery spawned an almost absurd amount of blogospheric discussion. Well, I see the shambling corpse of that debate is still lumbering through the Internets, though in this case it takes the form of two very smart porn-friendly posts at Culture11’s new “Ladyblog”.  […]

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I just got off the phone with 2003, and they’d like their ridiculous whining about “metrosexuals” back. The Spectator‘s reviewer is too gentle by far, but also, mercifully, sane enough to make the obvious point: The genuinely worrying gender-specific social pathologies—like, you know, committing violent crimes—tend not to crop up in the segments of society […]

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I’d meant to say something in passing about Kerry Howley’s righteous smackdown of noted telepath Melissa Lafsky, who had clucked her tongue at Kerry and other ova donors who won’t fess up to the deep emotional trauma they must have experienced as a result of the process. Favorite graf: It’s worth pointing out that anyone […]

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Harrison Hoffman at CNET thinks that the sudden elevation of The Dark Knight to the top film at IMDB illustrates a hole in the “wisdom of crowds” model. I think this is a bit off. For one, if we’re taking “the wisdom of crowds” to mean the bundle of concepts articulated in James Surowiecki’s book, […]

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Rob Harper at HuffPo decides to illustrate a manifestly dumb argument: No matter what any one says, whether they are black or white or even God himself (not that he would use the word), it is never, ever OK to use the ‘N’ word. In a joke, in a song, in private conversations, never, ever […]

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I think I’ve written to this effect before, but let me just cast my lot here with Kevin Drum contra Samhita Mukhopadhyay: Whether it’s particularly clever is a matter of taste—I usually find the execution as stale as the concept—but there’s clearly nothing groundbreaking about Stuff White People Like. It’s a species of well-worn yuppie/hipster […]

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This just in from Slate: Many applications and sites on the Interwebs encourage you to upload a headshot or profile picture of some kind! Some people obsessively update theirs, in search of the perfect profile pic. Others remain anonymous by using a humorous or ironic image! Are we sure “Michael Agger” isn’t a pseudonym for […]

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Update: Skip to the bottom for the Cliffs Notes version. Ta-Nehisi Coates has a post about the intersection of race and crime that dovetails with a conversation I had shortly after learning my friend Brian had been shot last week. I got to thinking about how the economic effects of past racism create breeding grounds […]

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