…should take care lest he become a blogger. I take some small satisfaction in noting that a certain Betty-Page-lookalike ex, who made a bit of fun when I started a blog back when we were dating, now has a blog of her own. It’s good, though primarily of interest to Fresnans and others on the […]

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In the wake of Brian Doherty’s article on the tax protest movement, I’ve seen a handful of letters from folks with links to a variety of sites pimping elaborate theories showing how, if you pull a sentence here or there from a few statutes and Supreme Court opinions, you can “prove” you’re not obligated to […]

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My friends occasionally (and justly) make fun of the desperate libertarian tendency to apply the l-word to any work of popular culture that shows even the most meager individualist or pro-market strand. (The protagonist bought something he wanted—a paean to the power of laissez faire! Keanu is “the one”—it’s all about the power of the […]

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Some rise, some fall, some climb, to get to Washington. Kriston at Grammar Police has an amusing look at the plague of li’l critters about to descend on our fair city.

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Wow. Wow wow wow. Siegfried was simply phenomenal. James Morris, a little shaky out of the gate in Das Rheingold, was on top of his game tonight, and Gabriele Schnaut definitely seems to have benefitted from getting to take an 18-year nap (and two acts off) before her duet with Siegfried… speaking of whom: Jon […]

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Photos from the AFF panel on Hipublicans and Millennials I did with Yglesias, Meghan Keane, and Wonkette are now up.

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I’m in New Jersey this week, accompanying my hyper-Wagnerian father to the opera geek’s equivalent of Woodstock or one of those Phish summer festivals: the Metropolitan Opera’s production of the Ring Cycle, AKA Der Ring des Nibelungen. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, in some circles, Der Ring des Nibelungen is a far, far better thing […]

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Aeon Skoble, editor of and contributor to several of those Your-Favorite-TV-Show-and-Philosophy books, jumps into the fray in the comments to this Crooked Timber post to defend their value. Others are skeptical. My own take: Great idea in principle, for many of the reasons Skoble mentions. But, on the basis of the ones I’ve looked at, […]

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“You’re so arrogant,” a friend recently chided me, “you don’t even realize you’re arrogant.” Probably true, but at least I’m not alone, according to this Scientific American piece by Michael Shermer.

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Responding to my post below, Radley makes the familiar (and valid) libertarian point that private certification services could take the place of state assessment of a restaurant’s sanitary status. He also makes an inapt comparison to the argument for smoking bans, which it’s worth getting out of the way first. As opponents of the smoking […]

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