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I just happened upon a handy feature at the D.C. Government website: Notices of food establishment closures. I was mildly grossed out to see that over the course of the last year, places at which I’ve occasionally eaten were cited (and temporarily shut down) for “evidence of rodents on the premises” and “basic inadequate sanitation.” […]

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Dodgeball is a nifty-looking service that works with social networking services like Orkut or Friendster. You use your mobile phone to text-message the service with the information that you’re headed to this bar or that club. It notifies your friends on the service, and lets you know of any friends-of-friends within a 10 block radius. […]

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Radley Balko notes this hilarious correction slated for tomorrow’s New York Times: Yesterday, the Times identified a man on page A21 as a Ku Klux Klan member found guilty of murdering a black sharecropper. Actually, the man was Pete Coors, head of Coors Brewing Company, and a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Coors is […]

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Matt’s not happy that I’m not happy about this whole conscription thing. First, on the charge of advancing a specifically Rawlsian formulation as definitive of “liberalism,” I suppose I’ll plead guilty. But it’s not as though the idea of citizens enjoying an inviolable (or, anyway, near-inviolable) sphere of individual autonomy is some kind of innovation […]

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Reader Brian Chase clues me in to the fact that a director for the planned Watchmen movie has been chosen. A few years back, the brilliant Terry Gilliam (of Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Twelve Monkeys fame) had been involved with a project, and lots of us were disappointed when that didn’t […]

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I’ve got a piece up at Reason on the company American Apparel, and on socially-conscious consumption more generally. Some of the comments on the piece make me think I got the emphasis a little wrong: It wasn’t really meant as an attack on AA. I like their clothes fine, and I engage in the same […]

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A few thoughts prompted by this genuinely distressing thread on the draft over at Pandagon, where an unsettling number of people seem genuinely perplexed at the notion that there’s something objectionable about forced labor. Those who suggest that forcing people to serve as tools to some worthy end—military or civilian—”rubs them the wrong way” often […]

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The success of a spate of movies based on big-name comic books has had the pleasant side effect of getting studios re-interested in the possibility of putting more obscure (but more interesting) comics characters on the screen. Now, PJ Doland notes that the producers of Hellboy have announced that their next project will be Watchmen. […]

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Kevin Drum and Amy Sullivan are wagging their finger at hosts on Air America for making fun of religion. They may be right that it’s politically counterproductive (though, as Matt Yglesias points out, talk radio isn’t primarily about outreach—Rush Limbaugh isn’t out to persuade swing voters). But then Kevin adds this: My advice: the next […]

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