My New Jersey driver’s licence was about to expire, and so today I finally got myself a Washington, DC, license. An amusing testament to the psychic power of state documentation, even for a libertarian, is that despite having lived here for almost two years now, despite having a lease on a house in the district […]

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So there’s an Orkut community called Outsourcing Backlash [Orkut account required] that describes itself as: A community for those who believe unmitigated outsourcing and unbalanced international trade is bad for America, and for those who object to being labeled as “isolationist” and “protectionist” for those beliefs. Ok, I’ll buy that with respect to “isolationist” (a […]

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Will notes a creative writing contest centering on the (fictional) discipline of Law and Aesthetics. But it occurs to me that, actually, the major theories advanced to offer an account of “what art is” (at least as I’ve understood them from Will, who’s teaching aesthetics at Howard U. this semester) parallel reasonably closely the major […]

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Y’know, this TCS piece gets at something I’ve been thinking throughout the Road to Serfdom 60th-aniversary hoopla. (In D.C. libertarian circles, anyway, there’s hoopla.) Because everyone seems to want to say that the book is just as relevant, or even more relevant, than when it was published. And it clearly just isn’t. Look, I love […]

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Seems everyone, most recently colleague Brian Doherty in The American Spectator, is offering muted congratulations to Dave Sim on the publication of the final, 300th issue of Cerebus, completing a comic book story that began some two years before I was born. Many of the comments are in the same vein as those of (the […]

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I’m as apalled as anyone by Noam Chomsky’s apologies for people like Pol Pot, but I think Pejman Yousefzadeh is off base in this TechCentralStation piece, which takes the linguist-cum-radical-pundit to task for focusing on perceived U.S. wrongdoing when there are so many indisputably heinous abusers of human rights out there. I don’t want to […]

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Jim Henley has written a great piece on the status of the superhero story in American letters.

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Constructive critiques from anyone who attended the Hipublicans panel this week are appreciated.

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Matt Yglesias has a post where he says that slippery slope arguments are often “logically” false but “empirically” correct. This gives me an opportunity to highlight a minor argumentative pet peeve of mine: the conflation of reductio arguments and slippery slope arguments, which are related but distinct—and I think it’s a distinction worth preserving. The […]

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Jon Rowe notes a decision in an intellectual property case [PDF] that pitts comics legends Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane against each other. In addition to whatever legal interest the case may offer, you also get to read Judge Richard Posner explicate—quite accurately—the origin story of Spawn. So now, in addition to law and economics, […]

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