Jim Henley mentions something that’s long bugged me. Not only do print newspapers and magazines typically fail to provide you with URLs to studies and websites they reference (excusable only because sometimes those are long and ungainly, easier to Google than type in) but the online versions of those articles are almost invariably lacking hyperlinks. […]

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Just a quick note that the new Belle and Sebastian album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress is really, really good. I picked it up a few weeks ago but had only listened to it a couple of times. Up there with If You’re Feeling Sinister.

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So the catalyst for this is a Corner post from Tim Graham: Howard Dean decides that his decision to back gay “civil unions” was actually a faith-based move. “The overwhelming evidence is that there is very significant, substantial genetic component to it…From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, […]

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On the Reason website today, I’ve got a look at religion and politics: “Gott Mit Uns.” And in the January issue, now online, there’s “Self Delusions,” my review of Owen Flanagan’s The Problem of the Soul

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…and I don’t feel any different. The clanking of crystal, alas, comes from my car window being smashed during the night as I move into new digs for a new year—a cute house over by the U Street corridor that I’m sharing with two other libertarian geeks. Despite my irritation at having to replace the […]

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I was recently flattered to be asked to do an installment of Crescat Sententia’s 20 Questions. The whole series is interesting: there are links to previous editions on CS’s left-column blogroll.

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A new CBO report on the long term budget outlook inspired some reflections on the problems of reforming entitlement spending in “Ride the Death Spiral.”

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Raised in a thoroughly secular household, the odds of my becoming a believer were probably slim from the start. But it was, oddly enough, Christmas that ensured it’d never happen. I don’t remember clearly when my parents first told me about Santa Claus, but I do remember being skeptical. Flying reindeer? How was that possible? […]

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While home for the holidays, Dad handed me a copy of a book inscribed to him by one of his former medical students: The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski. I started and finished it that same evening: An engaging, deftly written first novel that—being about people recently out of college finding their footing—I (unsurprisingly) found […]

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Among various gifts I was delighted to receive this Festivus (including a badass chess set to replace one destroyed by rampaging kittens) was the full run (on DVD) of Joss Whedon‘s fantastic sci-fi western Firefly, which was cancelled last year by shortsighted Fox executives in what historians will doubtless regard as the biggest cultural travesty […]

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