Miniver Cheevy

No doubt you are already familiar with the famous Evil Overlord List . When I've captured my adversary and he says, ''Look, b...

One of the reasons you should be reading Brad DeLong regularly is his ongoing discussion of the failures of our press corps . He has an int...

Lawrence Lessig is a great American. A constitutional lawyer, with experience helping formerly communist countries create new legal systems...

The ‘wardrobe incident’ during half time was the scene stealer of the Super Bowl. In fact, the half time show during the Super Bowl is now...

I'm sad to learn that Miles Drentell has died of cancer. He's only a fictional character, I know. But unlike Spock, he isn't...

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so a few things up front: the moral question is simple : Palestinian liberation is r...

Remember I told you to read Republic Dogs , a takeoff on Plato's Republic in the style of a Quentin Tarantino script? Go read it ag...

So a couple of years ago I was reading about Betty Boop and I learn that she's based on a real person, Helen Kane , a very popular ja...

“Miniver Cheevy” is the title of a semi-autobiographical poem by Edward Arlington Robinson. I first read the poem, and took a liking ...

Astonishing sidewalk chalk illustrations Look at that first one carefully.

A friend of mine is stranded out in America for a while. People like me, with weird interests, are pretty thin on the ground out there, w...

There's a terrific little entry on strange matter in the Wikipedia, pointed out to me by a friend who shares my opinion that the eviden...

It turns out that Wil Wheaton, the actor who played geeky kid Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation , actually is a geeky kid. W...

Today Brad DeLong has a provocative post in which he repeats the ''tale of the slave'' in Robert Nozick's Anarchy, Stat...

You may recall this little item in The Onion : Bush: 'Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over' WA...

Busy Busy Busy gets it right with its execution of the ''shorter'' concept: snide one- and two- sentence summaries of conse...

There's another well-done bit of anti-Bush propaganda from Bushflash.com that's been making the rounds, entitled Thanks for the Mem...

It's possible to group the 50 states into two categories: Givers and Takers. Giver states get back less than a dollar in spending for...

I have more for you from the Department of Crossing the Memes . Thanks to Dionysus Devotee , I can tell you about this little gem: Jac...

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a c...

Such is the nature of my generational / social class / cultural / tempermental position that few novels I have read really express the th...

Those of you interested in geekkultur may want to have a look at this astute article written by and for the smart, social, and socially aw...

Nock (n.) -- The cleft of an arrow, or of the fundament John Kersey's New English Dictionary (1772)

You may have noticed that the Bush administration is now saying that they never claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which were...

Okay. Okay. Someone is maintaining a blog of spam . Really. Check back every few days for new spam on the blog. It does not appear to be ...

Today there's a good rant over at The Volokh Conspiracy, quoting Paul Craig Roberts, Reagan's pick for Assistant Secretary of the T...

It turns out that several of the 9/11 hijackers were screened by the FAA. The 10-member bipartisan commission revealed that nine of the ...

As a way of pressuring my friend John Dunning into becoming a blogger, I'm going to rudely share with y'all an email he sent to me....

Now that I'm blogging, I'm thinking about blogging. Very meta. I'm not sure that I have anything to say about it yet, other than...

When I first read about Bayesian filtering for spam I dared to hope that it would work well enough to frustrate spammers out of existence. ...