Glen Whitman has an excellent post on the significance of statistical significance.

[Read more →]

I don’t have a whole lot to say that hasn’t been covered in the several amusing responses to the normally-lucid V-Po’s annoying suggestion that libertarians who favor Kerry over Bush must be victims of false consciousness struggling to fit in with the cool kids. As the other posters observe, this mostly just betrays a failure […]

[Read more →]

I actually am sufficiently out of the loop that I thought this had already happened weeks ago, but today fellow white-hispanic conspiracy member Matt Yglesias officially ditches the title “writing fellow” and is promoted to “staff writer” at the Prospect. You know where to send the flowers.

[Read more →]

I kind of like this one. And, since I haven’t been remembering to link my Reason pieces lately, this one too.

[Read more →]

Will Wilkinson pointed this phenomenon out to me a couple of months ago, and now, like a man who’s just finished a particularly compelling conspiracy novel, I’m seeing it everywhere: The use in casual conversation of totally superfluous negations in the process of affirming something. I’m talking about things like: GUY 1: You’re coming tomorrow […]

[Read more →]

Well, not really, no more so than Samuel Pepys, I suppose. But I finally got to leafing through a collection of the great Italian fabulist‘s collection of autobiographical writing, Hermit in Paris. The first major section is a series of letters from the states, mostly New York, arranged under rather blog-like subject headings. Calvino sent […]

[Read more →]

Last Friday, I finally got around to seeing Farenheit 9/11, and I’m afraid I don’t have a whole lot to add to what’s already been said, though I think it probably bodes ill for Bush that a movie this bad, on a number of levels, sold out every showing but the 11:00 and the midnight […]

[Read more →]

I’m always a little puzzled by a rhetorical strategy I occasionally encounter in friendly political arguments. I’ll often, unsurprisingly enough, end up taking a libertarian position, and midway through the back-and-forth, my interlocutor will respond with something like: “Well, you’re a libertarian, so of course you think that, but…” as if to suggest that an […]

[Read more →]

Speaking of Glen, he’s got a nice, Seuss inspired analysis of two kinds of “games” driving patronage at bars and other social spots. Which makes me think of a devious way an unscrupulous bar owner could undermine his competitors. Say you’ve got a spot you’re trying to market to one of several self-segregating demographics—following Glen, […]

[Read more →]

Neal Whitman, brother of ex-roomie-cum-econoblogger Glen Whitman, has launched his own linguistics blog, Literal-Minded. Check it.

[Read more →]