Ezra wants to debunk the “pernicious fallacy” that income is “somehow related to the virtue or necessity of the position, rather than its skill level and the supply of labor willing and capable of filling it.” Well, no dispute here, but whose fallacy is this supposed to be? Sure, there are very crude versions of […]

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Best. Condom Ad. Evar.

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What the hell was up with Jim Webb? Was one of his old Army buddies dancing around off camera making faces and rubbing his own nipples? For most of the second half of his response he looked like he was this close to busting out laughing at some private joke.

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Here’s something I’d love to see: Get the writers from The Colbert Report to sit down and watch the State of the Union (with help from the advance script, of course), then air the speech on a ten minute delay with a running text “supplement” after the fashion of “The Word”. Addendum: OK, wow, never […]

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I see (belatedly) via Arts & Letters Daily that the Texistentialist, University of Austin philosopher Robert Solomon, died earlier this month. The Chronicle of Higher Ed has just posthumously printed his final essay, in which he hits on many of the same themes as in this excerpt from Waking Life, which is how he’s best […]

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The Heritage Foundation has just released a paper on conservative “fusionism,” presumably at least implicitly meant as a response to the “conservative crack-up” and “liberaltarian” memes recently circulating. It’s interesting enough as history, but gets weirdly muddled and ethereal when it gets to the final section, a call for a “renewed” fusionism based on limited […]

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Gentle reader, meet the Alien Lighter, recently rescued from safekeeping at my father’s house in New Jersey. This little piece of kitsch is, believe it or not, one of my most valued possessions; read on and learn its secrets. I first met the Alien Lighter as a freshman debate geek at NYU, by way of […]

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The comments on a recent post by Dave at Hit and Run, jumping off Jim Henley’s got me thinking about the perennially bemoaned fact that we have a large class of pundits who specialize in making predictions and projections, that many of them seem to have a near infallible knack for getting things grievously wrong, […]

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In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell famously tagged a plethora of “ready-made phrases” that the lazy writer—I include myself here—will often be tempted to employ to do his thinking for him. (I’m hoping Stanley Fish’s blasting PatEL as “the most overrated essay in the modern canon” will immunize me from the observation that invoking […]

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I was going to post about something that came up in conversation with Yglesias earlier today—the way that policy discussion gets skewed because health, which can be scientifically quantified, takes on an aura of being more objectively valuable than other sources of human satisfaction, even though almost all of us think it’s sometimes worth trading […]

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