Scary bear
Matt Yglesias writes : [C]ompare attitudes toward Putin's illiberalism to attitudes toward friendlier petro-states like Saudi Arabia, Qa...
Injustice anywhere
In Slate , Anne Applebaum tries to explain why there are so few Western feminists campaigning against the horrific repression of women in S...
The math of abstinence education
Palestinian armchair quarterbacking
Ahmed Samih Khalidi writes in the Guardian that a Palestinian state would be bad for Palestinians : Today, the Palestinian state is largely...
No, YOUR religion sucks
Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, is about to release an article in the New York Times magazine asking "Don't Mormons believe tha...
Michael Jordan disses the NBA
I was pretty shocked this morning to wake up and read that Paul Samuelson is no longer a free trader . For those who don't know, Paul Sa...
12 years from now
From an international survey conducted by a German research organization: More and more people in China and other leading countries expect ...
Oh look, a Republican whining about diversity
In the Washington Post , Robert Maranto laments the lack of conservatives in academia . This is a common lament among Republicans, who sudde...
Yew got it
Writing in Forbes , Singaporean elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew - possibly Asia's most respected modern leader - explains why nations fear ...
Wanted: Better atheist PR
Most reviews of the movie The Golden Compass have come in negative . The movie is an adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman's fa...
On second thought, soak the poor...
Looks like I was wrong about the Bush subprime mortgage bailout plan helping the por at the expense of the rich. Looks like it actually won...
Chinese historical supremacy debunked
A fairly anodyne Financial Times editorial about racism contains this little aside: Chinese long pre-dated European civilisation. From this...
Facile
File these two under "intellectually dishonest": 1. Tom Friedman writes that "none of the leading presidential candidates ha...
But everybody else likes them
Carrie Brownstein, a former rocker (of Sleater-Kinney) and current writer and NPR contributor, writes that Radiohead just leaves her cold . ...
Onward Muslim soldiers
Matt Yglesias takes up the question of whether Islam is in the middle of, or possibly about to have, its own Reformation. I usually think s...
Soak the rich!
There's a Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of the U.S. economy - a huge number of adjustable-rate mortgages are about to reset f...
Pax Americana RIP
Jonah Goldberg, who has somehow gotten a writing job with the L.A. Times , writes that America is not an empire, it just leads the free worl...
Race and Intelligence, Parts 2 through 1,000,000
And just when we thought the whole "race and intelligence" thing was dying down, here comes Slate 's William Saletan with a hu...
This is only the beginning
Some people will read about how researchers have made stem cells out of skin cells , and conclude that the effort of theocratic conservative...
We don't do nation-building
As I read this article about American's declining reading habits , I had a thought. The article points out that: Sixty-one percent of t...
Who coddles dictators?
After reading an article on China's support for Iran , I tried to think of all the dictatorships whose regimes enjoy significant politic...
Will abstain for $$$
An interesting survey finds that most NYU students would give up their right to vote for one year for a year's worth of free tuition. A...
Diamonds or Pearls
As it's actually getting somewhat close to the primary season, and since I now actually own a TV, I've started watching the Democrat...
Slavery vs. Santa Claus
A pretty textbook Econ 101 defense of free trade appears in this week's Foreign Policy magazine (usually a forum for more original, subt...
One can't live as cheap as two
A new report reveals that about half of black people born to middle-class families in 1960 grew up to be poor, despite the fact that averag...
Economic thought of the day
This is in response to an article my sister emailed me about the economic side of the immigration debate. The article is more than a year o...
The strong horse
Why haven't we condemned Pervez Musharraf's brutal destruction of Pakistani democracy and civil society? Conventional wisdom is th...
Crusader
FP Passport points out what some others had already realized - Rudy Giuliani's "weakness" as regards the Religious Right is ...
Do unto others
Interesting article about waterboarding in the WaPo today. Did you know that we convicted Japanese war criminals after WW2 for waterboardin...
Article of the day
Sigh. It occurs to me that the current political struggle is less of a fight over policy than a clash between two very different visions of ...
Hillary Clinton is electable, Part 3
From MSNBC.com : More than half of white evangelical Republicans would consider voting for a conservative third-party candidate should the 2...
Subbacultcha
Robert Samuelson reviews Gordon Clark's "A Farewell to Alms," and I guess it's a favorable review, since Samuelson summar...
