Category: A Healthy Commotion

In Praise of Leisure and the Pitfalls of Unions

Mark Linsenmayer outlines Bertrand Russell’s case in “In Praise of Idleness” for a shorter work week. Writing in the early 20th century, Russell spent most of his essay confronting the moralistic arguments against leisure....

Poverty: Giving a Damn

It’s just awful hard for me to take the technocratically-minded conservative arguments especially seriously when it’s so evident that many conservatives — high-up ones, not just low-level activists — really don’t give a damn about poverty.

De-gendering the School

I was originally going to post on this in more detail, but that was before I’d had time to finish the entire piece. It turns out Rod Dreher doesn’t just think that Arcadia Unified...

A New Kind of Grand Bargain

Alex Pareene noticed this, too, but something I wanted to highlight is the fact that the president’s calling his new proposal — a cut to corporate tax rates in exchange for using the freed-up money...

Silicon Stupid

An instant classic in the field of so-bad-it’s-good.

Of Radicals and Liberals

It won’t come as a surprise that I tend to agree with Shawn’s assessment of mainstream liberalism’s relationship to its leftier-than-thou radicals. In the comments though, NewDealer’s remark helps crystalize the real conflict,

What Mitt Romney Meant

A new Economist piece sheds light on whether or not Romney’s 2012 rhetoric was as plastic as it seemed.

The Sequester: Still a Thing

The most obvious and lasting results of the sequester are being felt by those who need the government most, and influence it the least.

The Inequality President

Reading the interview, you get the impression of a guy already trying to define the way his presidency is interpreted and his immediate post-presidency is understood.

Beyond Redemption

There’s a frequent exchange that appears in one form or another throughout Plato’s dialogues. It focuses on the question of whether it’s better to suffer or be the one inflicting the suffering. Of course,...