Did private industry create the railroads?
Speaking of Kevin Carson, I would very much like for him to school the editors of The Washington Examiner about whether the railroad industry would have developed without state subsidization.
Author: Will
Two paths to resilience
Compare and contrast: Consumer culture leaves Americans better prepared for hard times. Meanwhile, older virtues help Ireland weather the recession.
Friday Night Jukebox
I saw School of Seven Bells last night, and they were pretty excellent live. Enjoy:
Is the insurance mandate constitutional? Of course – health care reform wouldn’t work without it!
Seriously. Even if you’re not sympathetic to questions about the insurance mandate’s constitutionality, this is just a deeply silly argument.
Quote of the Day
“Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.” – Kelly Khuri, founder of the Clark County Tea Party Patriots. Guess what, Kelly? They were right!
Norberg on Vargas Llosa and the Nobel
The Swedish Left is beyond parody. Llosa’s best line: “For reasons that elude me, anyone defending freedom of expression, free elections and political pluralism in Latin America is known as a[n authoritarian] right-winger among...
Why we’re stuck with the War on Terror
Prompted by this entry from Greenwald, Erik and Tim Kowal kicked off a Gmail debate about why there’s such a startling degree of continuity between the Obama and Bush Administration’s counter-terror policies. The answer...
Wes Anderson: The College Years
The New York Times digs up Anderson and Owen Wilson’s contributions to Analecta, UT’s student literary magazine.
The Future
In lieu of real blogging, I thought I’d throw out some ideas from Ian M. Banks’ introductory essay on his Culture novels (via io9). Here’s Banks on the future obsolescence of market economics: Concomitant...
Actually, I’d like to know how D’Souza thinks
I realize that political publications lob softball questions at ideological fellow-travelers all the time, but National Review’s “interview” with Dinesh D’Souza about his bizarre Forbes cover story is truly embarrassing. First, he gets basic...
Recommended Reading
Matt Labash has a new article out on Michigan’s nascent medical marijuana industry. Like pretty much everything he writes, it’s extremely funny, but Labash’s actual views on the issue seem to fall somewhere in...
Revisiting Millman’s Taxonomy
Unlike Lisa, I’m hesitant to describe populism as a complete ideology. The characteristics of American populism she identifies – evangelism, a healthy skepticism towards meritocratic achievement, a reverence for the “ordinary” – are certainly...
This Week’s Big Think Piece
Gladwell’s New Yorker article on the limits of social media is, I think, completely correct.
How Boys Learn to Read
Great op-ed from The Wall Street Journal: The appearance of the boy-girl literacy gap happens to coincide with the proliferation of video games and other electronic forms of entertainment over the last decade or...
“It’s hard to explain why you end up in Eragon and not GoodFellas”
That’s John Malkovich, trying to explain why he passed on Goodfellas, in a pretty great series of interviews with the cast and crew 20 years on. Even if you don’t like the film –...
The Precautionary Marriage Principle
My views on marriage are pretty unformed, but – given the recent Sullivan-Douthat exchange – I thought I’d try my hand at explaining the type of secular, prudential argument against gay marriage that makes...
Douthat Responds to Sullivan on Gay Marriage
Pretty powerful stuff, even if you don’t agree with his conclusion, and by far the most persuasive prudential case against gay marriage I’ve encountered. Read the whole thing.
