Author: Freddie

I know that, here at the League, and among most decent people, we’d like to believe that the true strength of argument comes from mutual respect, argumentative decorum and a dedication to the exchange...

Via Andrew, Andrew Exum complains that Glenn Greenwald cherry picks which experts on the ground to listen to about the conditions in Afghanistan. Fair enough. But this is actually an argument against foreign occupation...

Read Conor Friedersdorf. One thing I failed to point out in my initial post is that part of the problem with running a weekly column is that every one that comes out it is...

Forgive me for rerunning a post and looking like I’m not doing my homework. But there’s been some discussion about our racial dialogue lately, and it seems to me that while genuine progress is...

You can chalk this up to the list of things that I complain about once a year. So feel free to skip this if you’ve heard it before. Here’s the deal: the divorce rate,...

The Old Women of the Ocean by Pablo Neruda translated by Jodey Bateman To the solemn sea the old women come With their shawls knotted around their necks With their fragile feet cracking. They...

Let me preface this by saying that I couldn’t care less about what people choose to eat, whether it’s no meat or all meat or no wheatgerm or whatever. I can’t imagine wanting to...

Part of what makes the Israel-Palestine debate so wearying is that so many fundamental broken arguments have a remarkable persistence. This is largely a result of the huge role that emotionalism, ad hominem and...

The recently-interviewed Conor Friedersdorf is starting a twitter feed where he aggregates what he feels is the best nonfiction writing. Check it out at http://twitter.com/JournoCurator .

Via Alan Jacobs of Text Patterns fame, check out this amazing letter from Dwight Eisenhower from the last days of World War II.

Snarleyow by Rudyard Kipling This ‘appened in a battle to a batt’ry of the corps Which is first among the women an’ amazin’ first in war; An’ what the bloomin’ battle was I don’t...

I suppose I could tie this post to this latest interview of Richard Dawkins in Salon.com, but I don’t really need. It’s just the same; it’s always the same. Honestly, I really wonder about...

Conor mans the battlements re: my post on Douthat.

When the New York Times ended (or Bill Kristol ended) the absurd farce of having among their columnists an utterly discredited, partisan neocon whose every assumption and prediction about Iraq had proven brutally and...

the Beggar by Ogden Nash (After William Blake) Beggar, beggar, burning low In the city’s trodden snow, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy dread asymmetry? In what distant deep of lies Died...

So people are trying to convince me that the death of newspapers doesn’t matter because of the astonishing rise of Internet journalism. And one great advantage of Internet journalism, I’m told, is that people...

As many movement conservatives enjoy expressing outrage more than they enjoy sex, eating or the company of friends and loved ones, and as the entire conservative media is devoted to expressing ever-escalating outrage and...

“The rhetorical feat that the manifesto accomplishes is in making its threats continual, without resolution. The manifesto spoils for a fight and never ceases.” – Prendergast, Catherine. “Fighting Words.” College English 72.1 (2009): 10-28.

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my...