Doctor Sardonicus in the Urinal
With the annual onset of seasonal depression my curmudgeon persona returns and promptly begins griping about every stupid fishing thing around me. Some of you might wonder how much that persona, who we can...
Monthly Archive: September 2011
Friday Afternoon Jukebox
I don’t know how things are in the rest of the world, but in my corner it looks to be sunny and beautiful but not hot; what’s more, we’re going into a weekend that...
Do People Still Listen to Books on Tape?
If so, then perhaps this recording of Flannery O’Connor reading “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” at Vanderbilt, some fifty-two years ago, should be queued up for your next trip. Or maybe just...
In Which The Parties Are Remarkably Consistent
So there’s this new Republican plan in Pennsylvania under which the state would assign its electoral votes to presidential candidates based on which congressional district is won by each (which, of course, is what...
Comment Rescue: True Rejections
A True Rejection is a scenario or a set of facts that — if it were true — would cause you to revise a conclusion that you have expressed. New commenter OhB1Knewbie understands: THIS...
Bachmann, Perry and HPV
Let me begin by dispensing with the easiest parts first. Michele Bachmann is an idiot. “I’m offended for all the little girls and parents that didn’t have a choice,” [Bachmann] said. (Actually, any parent...
Political Theodicy
About five years back, Matt Yglesias came up with a great little analogy called “The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics“. It’s a pretty scathing criticism of the (primarily “neocon”) attitude that pretty much any geopolitical goal...
On Lowering or Eliminating the Minimum Wage
What do people think about lowering or eliminating the minimum wage right now?
A Question for both Pro-Life and Pro-Choice Supporters
I’d like to ask a question of both those that are Pro-Life and those that are Pro-Choice. To be more precise, I have a question and then one of two follow up questions. These...
How to Stop Pennsylvania from Mattering
by E.C. Gach I wrote recently about the difficulties associated with our anachronistic political institutions. The Constitution, and the division of powers between states and the federal government it lays out, while created by...
On Sports, Culture, and the Desire for Meaningful Change
(above photo: the Cincinnati Bengals doing the Ickey Shuffle. That’s right. I said the Ickey Shuffle. It was a thing.) For a while now, I’ve been trying to sort out why I think that...
Book Review: The Magician King
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians posed the question “What if your childhood fantasy turned out to be real?” Quentin Coldwater had always been obsessed with magic, and particularly with Fillory, a Narnia-like land from a...
Darwin and Smith
If you have a spare hour I strongly recommend listening to the latest episode of Econtalk. Russ Roberts interviews Robert Frank, and they talk about markets – how they go right, how they go...
Gripes
I’m not feeling super-motivated to write about politics these days – the two debates and the job speech over the last couple weeks have left me too exhausted to even bother – so instead...
Should Microsoft Let This Man Die?
Here’s a healthy man of thirty. He’s an architect. He’s never worked for Microsoft. He decides not to get health insurance. Then — against all odds — he gets a rare form of cancer....
The Future of Affirmative Action
~by Aaron There is an ongoing war in Michigan on the status of affirmative action in higher education, and a new chapter of this conflict opened on July 1: the 6th Circuit Court of...
Thinking in Song
At FPR, Gregory Butler has written a nice discussion of Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising. This album has been one to which I’ve returned with time, and my opinion of it has grown, slowly but...
I didn’t watch the Tea Party debate
But Aaron Carroll did. He writes: Let’s start here with the moment I screamed at the TV. I’m sorry, but the audience cheering the idea of letting a thirty-year old who got sick without...
