Paul Ryan Strikes Again: The Reihan Salam Edition
Reihan Salam is, best as I can tell, the smartest right-wing pundit of his generation. He also seems, by and large, to be a decent guy. He’s not especially vitriolic or militant and he...
Monthly Archive: April 2012
The Moral Treatment, Hygiene, and Education of Idiots
The Moral Treatment, Hygiene, and Education of Idiots and Other Backward Children is perhaps not the most auspicious book title. Nor is Idiocy: and Its Treatment by the Physiological Method. Recently I’ve had the opportunity to...
Happy Easter!
So maybe I’m not the ideal League member to wish everyone a most Happy Easter, self-professed heathen that I am. But Happy Easter, everyone! We never went to church on Easter when I was...
Can We At Least All Agree that John Derbyshire is Racist?
OK, I know that for supporters of the Right here that it’s a sign of either my intellectual dishonesty or my being an intellectual lightweight that I can hear even echoes of racism in...
Draft Protests
Perhaps it’s best to think of our historical opposition to war not as war protest but as draft protest. I’ve been reading Jerome Marmorstein’s “War As a Disease Epidemic” lately with a student I...
Friday Morning Jukebox: Matthew Ryan
A couple songs from Pennsylvania native Matthew Ryan. Ryan has a rather… distinct voice. If that’s the sort of thing that bothers you, Ryan might not be up your alley. He’s officially marked as...
Art, Morality, Music, and Fallout Open Open Thread
We were arguing about art at work in the lab the other day. Not the aesthetic value argument (though that *IS* a good one) but about whether art could be moral in any meaninful...
Quick Poll: Name Those Cities
Over at NaPP, I asked people to name the first three cities that came to mind for four states (UT, ID, MT, & WY). Commenter Peter added four more (AR, RI, DE, & SD)...
My own experience of being gay in medicine
Yesterday Andrew Sullivan linked to an item at WBUR’s Common Health blog, in which Dr. Mark Schuster, a tenured professor and pediatrician at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital tells his story of being a gay man entering the medical...
The destructiveness of “hard work”
Few things in American society are as universally revered as a good work ethic. It’s one of the core values we attempt to instill in our offspring. Commentators and politicians have been known to...
On “Truth” and Its Consequences – Why We Need A New Business Model for 21st Century Journalism
On January 6, NPR’s This American Life aired an hour long and fairly damning segment on the working conditions of the Chinese manufacturing workers that build Apple products. To say the show got some...
The Future Is Now: The Birth Of The American Wasteland
A really interesting piece from the Times‘ Binyamin Appelbaum focuses on how parts of the country where the housing bubble was the most pronounced — and where there was historically nowhere near the same...
Pick ‘Em Bleg
I went to check Yahoo! ™ to see who won our little competition, but it seems that they have already euthanized the bracket groups. Anyone know who the winner was? (I apologize for not...
Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln, How Was the Nineteenth Century?
Even more of that discussion I can’t believe we’re having. Here I’ll argue that a strict, property-and-contract-only libertarian should still detest the nineteenth century. On his own terms.
More Facebook
Tom wrote a post a while back about employers demanding that employees turn over their Facebook passwords. My opinion was that this is a very bad idea, and Tod pointed out some salient reasons...
How Not to Discuss Whether We Need Stories
“Do we need stories?” asks Tim Parks. An interesting question. And an important one. But not a matter easily resolved within the confines of a few tweets, a couple Facebook updates, or an entire blog post...
The Roots of Scandal
The clergy-abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic church throughout the last decade has probably gained the most attention regarding the criminal way that problem priests were moved around and never turned in to authorities....
Leaguefest 2012: Reservations Still Available
If you have not already made plans to do so, please take a moment this week to solidfy your arrangements to attend Leaguefest 2012 and join the dozen or so of your colleagues here....
Bible Verse and Commentary
Matthew 25:31-46 – “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and...
I Knew It! I Knew It!
“Everything we have in the book is documented. It is not theory or hypothesis. It is fact,” renowned private investigator William C. Dear told The Huffington Post about his book, “O.J. Is Innocent and...
