Via Crooked Timber, I see that eminent sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan, who among other things was responsibile for launching that whole crazy John Lott investigation, has died.

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First, an emphatic nod to Radley Balko that it’s a bit odd to tar as “unserious” about foreign policy analysts who seem to have had a more accurate view of what the consequences of invading Iraq would be than their opponents. While that is, I think, more important than whether the view in question has […]

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An interesting post over at The Volokh Conspiracy considers one reader’s comments on the place of religion in public deliberation: Personally I hold the position that it’s illegitimate (from an ethical, not a constitutional standpoint) to justify one’s decisions about how society should be run based on assumptions one cannot defend reasonably. As I have […]

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From Ryan Sager, on “the future of libertarianism,” we get: The main problem with libertarians right now, frankly, is their inability to have anything serious to say regarding foreign policy. Pacifism combined with isolationism, as preached more or less by many at Cato and Reason is neither the popular nor the correct answer to the […]

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My usual take is on free will is that it’s an illusion, but that it also doesn’t much matter, because (contrary to the belief of its most ardent defenders—which belief is really the only reason anyone would try to defend it) it doesn’t make much real difference in terms of moral practice, the assessment of […]

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As someone who’s a big promoter of the Rawlsian project of Political Liberalism, I’ve found myself having some second thoughts occasioned, in part, by this very good TNR essay. I still think we ultimately want a political order that begins with the premise that deep pluralism is an ineradicable corrolary of freedom of conscience, and […]

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So I rember thinking that the AI online game known as “The Beast” was pretty cool, though I only discovered it long after it was over. Well, there’s another pretty cool looking one now in progress, run by Sharp. Potentially addictive looking…

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It’s hard to sufficiently emphasize the jaw-dropping power of David Brooks’ Times column from this weekend. Brooks reports, in essence, that the career analysts at the CIA are so appalled at the manipulative cherry-picking of their bosses in the White House that they’ve been pushed to the point of leaking pre-war analyses, so that when […]

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Laugh so you don’t cry: To explain [how a future invasion of Iran might play out] he spent thirty minutes presenting the very sorts of slides most likely to impress civilians: those with sweeping arrows indicating the rapid movement of men across terrain. When the exercise was over, I told David Kay that an observer […]

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Salon is perplexed by two versions of the “Bush’s bulge” explanation. One: Sources in the Secret Service told The Hill that Bush was wearing a bulletproof vest, as he does most of the time when appearing in public. The president’s handlers did not want to admit as much during the campaign, for fear of disclosing […]

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