Monthly Archive: January 2012

There have been a number of comments on a recent post that have glanced sidelong at a problem domain with which I’m reasonably familiar… and since we have a number of digital gearheads who...

From The Rural Blog: Studies regarding student mobility — how often students switch schools — has usually been focused on poor urban areas, but new research suggests rural student mobility may be as big...

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a...

Maybe this would be otherwise if I’d followed the discussions around here of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart thesis a little more closely, but I was struck by the math in David Brooks’ column* today:

We won’t make you read, though. We’re going to watch the first season of Fringe and talk and argue about it. We’ll hammer out how many episodes we want to watch between posts (which...

This CBO study is being touted as proof by conservatives that the answer to this question is a resounding “YES!”  Going nearly as far is Megan McArdle, who nonetheless argues that “the CBO’s data suggest...

From the Wikipedia entry: On September 1, 1951, as the Fisherman’s Special emptied its passengers, 62 fares climbed aboard the PELICAN, plus its Captain, Eddie Carroll and mate. The 42 foot PELICAN left Fishangrila...

Hey folks! I’m getting back to play writing with a screwball comedy. It’s about a corrupt big city mayor who takes on some grand and insincere endeavor to improve his image. It has to be something...

The porn industry is quick to raise the First Amendment as its primary argument against governmental intervention of any sort. And not without justification — governments from the Feds down to municipalities are notoriously...

I wrote, some time ago, that Grant becomes the hero of Shelby Foote’s Civil War because “he fights, unlike his colleagues on either side, who dilly-dally, blundering into and through battle and prolonging the...

Responding to this Spencer Ackerman piece in Tablet, in which the Wired.com senior writer comes down on the anti- side of the ongoing controversy over the phrase “Israel-Firsters,” Freddie has a spot-on summary of...

(Note: For those that are stumbling upon this enterprise for the first time, an explanation of of my Grasping at Belief posts can be found here.)   Lessons Jonah 3: 1-5, 10 1 Then the...

I’m currently visiting family in Oklahoma, the state that passed a law last year that made it illegal for judges to rule using Sharia instead of State and Federal law.  (Because clearly that’s where...

Stuck in an airport with my iPad yesterday, I came across this riff by Christian Toto over at Big Government on the success of George Lucas’s Red Tails at the box office: “Red Tails”...

At the risk of abusing the rule of thumb that we Leaguers don’t have to abide by the strictures of journalistic timeliness, I’m going to riff off of a Freddie deBoer post from last...