Miniver Cheevy

A friend reports ranting in response to a smug ignoramus asserting that the United States Civil War was “not about slavery”: You just ...

It turns out that in the 1970s, the Canadian government performed an experiment in guaranteed minimum income in a small town. It ran for...

An acquaintance recently observed that there's a certain kind of White guy Social Justice Warrior who sometimes starts ranting about ...

Right after I assembled a long Storify about the challenges to good faith disagreement about social justice questions in a world full of...

“Nazis! I hate these guys!” This should be handy to have handy.

Via Jim Henley, I learn of Why I Hate River Tam . Mostly, what I think I don’t like about River Tam is what the rampant adoration of ...

Having watched Hugo Schwyzer's Twitter meltdown in real time yesterday, I finally got around to reviewing the critiques of him close...

Kevin Drum has a long quote from Daniel Ellsberg explaining to a young Henry Kissinger about access to government secrets above Top Secr...

I want sharper tools for thinking about cultural appropriation. Here are some commentaries I find helpful. Kids, Kimonos, and ...

Written for an old friend. The one thing you can count on is that time moves forward one day per day, and all of this will be replaced...

I must remember not to use this power for evil.

I have long had an impish desire for a tattoo: וְשֶׂרֶט לָנֶפֶשׁ לֹא תִתְּנוּ בִּבְשַׂרְכֶם וּכְתֹבֶת קַעֲקַע לֹא תִתְּנוּ בָּכֶם ...

One of the enduring mysteries of American politics is why Obama, among many others, did not propose a three-word alternative to the syste...

Neal Stephenson's satirical first novel The Big U is rightly obscure. It's not very good. But there are moments where you can se...

This is funny and I feel confident that I will have a use for it some day. In case you haven't seen it around, it's a ref...

It would be naïve to call these guys representative of a force for good or a force for evil. They are better understood as a force with ...

Clearing his throat on the way to reviewing Jaron Lanier's new book Who Owns The Future? , Freddie deBoer provides a spot-on summati...

Here's yet another study demonstrating the obvious. Providing free, reliable birth control to women could prevent between 41 perc...

A little magic on Twitter today from a great American poet:

I’ve been reading commentaries (and commenting myself) on George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon Martin, and I've discovered folk...

John Harrison at the journalism blog JMACED adds a smart little wrinkle to a commonplace observation. There are many people who c...

Digby, in talking about the militarization of American police, makes a general observation about the minarchist-libertarian strain in th...

An apostate from the “pro-life” movement discovers the hypocrisy of the movement and its real motivation. I found that making birth c...

Robert Reich asks a pointed question. Suppose a small group of extremely wealthy people sought to systematically destroy the U.S. gov...

In my index Understanding American Politics I offer links to various folks offering ways of thinking about the difference between the br...

Dorian Taylor offers a nice overview of some very useful vocabulary so I will never again have to explain from scratch what I'm talk...

Salon has a little summary of how the IRS “scandal” is nonsense ginned up by the VRWC. The IRS affair is now frozen in public opinion...

A fascinating history of trash collection in New York City. In its early days, the department [of sanitation] didn’t really function ...

I just made a prediction on Twitter. Azrielen asked So how long now until polyamory is up for actual discussion? 100 years, you thin...

The left blogsophere is fond of quoting this editorial from the conservative National Review from 24 August 1957, written by William F. ...