Nullification or not, a vote for Prop 19 was a vote to end a bloody war in Mexico.
Josh Marshall is right to view California’s failed effort to legalize marijuana in U.S.-centric terms and find it wanting. But when viewed from the perspe...
Category: ideas
epistemology, philosophy, theology, religion
The fantasy of a religious leader heeding signs from the beyond.
It’s tempting to consider these before and after pictures: 1999 statue by Maurizio Cattelan.Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite 2009 new story.Po...
The emotional states of America: the problem with political identities is they’re not as fluid as politics.
The problem with political parties that offer their followers an identity is that identities are inherently conservative. If a certain attitude – say, animosity...
Common sense solutions exist because of disciplined trial and error, not guesswork.
All year long the new Speaker of the House John Boehner has been promising “common sense reforms” to the spiraling costs of health care and the myri...
Good on Colbert, Stewart and Co. Haters will hate but comedy is how stable societies evolve. Politics without humor is tribal war.
I’ve read a few comments today from liberals all too happy to piss on the Colbert Stewart Parade because it’s not political enough or not the right ...
The politics of personality disorders: Tom Junod on the Tea Party as a coalescence of resentment.
A few weeks ago I wrote that there might not be a Tea Party if more Americans treated their elders with love and compassion. Tom Junod has written a lengthy ess...
Sony, 30 years of headphone music and psychoaccoustic tomfoolery in Wham!’s Everything She Wants
Josh Marshall notes that Sony is retiring the Walkman and what a revolution that product represents. I couldn’t agree more. Just now I was listening to Ev...
For a funny reconciliation of Jesus and Darwin, please read “When the Yogurt Took Over” by John Scalzi http://is.gd/gez4G
John Scalzi’s When the Yogurt Took Over: A Short Story is a wonderful take on evolution and the role of humans in the big picture (hint: not necessarily c...
Your dog has been ringing for the last four hours. Please pick it up. Or, a smart collar and smartphone app product.
I think knowledge of how dogs work is not equally distributed (otherwise, why would Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, be rich and famous?) However, knowledge of ...
Sean Wilentz revisits the 1950s to witness the birth of the Tea Party; also of Mad Men and Glenn Beck.
Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker: “The current right-wing resurgence has more to do with the inner dynamics of American conservatism in the past half centur...
The wonderful experimental video Oops and the phenomenology of film.
There are many reasons to love the 10 minute video Oops by Chris Beckman only one of which is that it can serve as a great reference for a discussion of the phe...
On dozing, falling in and out of sleep and landing behind the curtains.
Last night, while dozing off to sleep, I had the rare pleasure of slipping in between states of consciousness, neither fully in nor out. I was thus able to obse...
One out of ten dentists is right: Dr. John Ioannidis’ research into error rates, bias and funding in The Atlantic
Dr. John Ioannidis profiled in The Atlantic: …Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomi...
Want to improve the political climate? Make economics a national pastime.
If the left wants to convince voters the stimulus package was effective, it should focus on teaching Americans basic economic theory. Only then does it stand a ...
Among the groups that regularly use science over faith: business. That’s worth celebrating.
As much smack as I talk about the business community, I prefer to side with organizations that invest in science rather than faith. Here are the headlines from ...
Movies about the lives of adolescents.
A few weeks ago I panned the movie Easy A as a teen drag performance and a bad one at that. Using teens and teen scenarios to tell adult stories is not inherent...
The nightmares of PTSD.
Emma Young: “When you look at the dreams of patients with PTSD, you see these nearly veridical ‘replays’ of the actual trauma event,” says Stickgold. This sort ...
Sports and other games for self-understanding.
Will Self: Men – and some women – watch football, dispute and debate football, and even occasionally kick a ball around, because it offers them a small-scale mo...
We have little idea how people talked a hundred years ago.
Graham Robb: The problem is, do we know how “a human being” spoke a hundred years ago? Even a perfect recording could not restore the familiar backdrop of the t...
Teen drag.
We went to see the movie Easy A last night. Casting adults to play the role of teens is nothing new. Neither is writing adult dialogue for teens to recite. (At ...