Our 24/7 media culture has created a climate where persons accused of sensational crimes are presumed guilty.

Magazines routinely run great pieces by highly biased writers. Why can’t newspapers do the same?

A while back, I explored “Why College Tuition is Growing So Fast” through the lens of MIT artificial intelligence guru Patrick Henry Winston‘s writings.   He argued that administrative costs are skyrocketing and that higher education was one of the few industries not taking advantage of the advances in technology, particularly computers, to increase efficiency. My [...]

Remember back in 1992, when “Saturday Night Live” was funny?  Or, at least, we watched it because there weren’t as many channels and TiVo hadn’t been invented?    You probably remember this, then: It’s Sinead O’Connor, a bald Irish singer of whom I’d never previously heard, tearing up a picture of Karol Wojtyla, aka Pope John [...]

Like many of us, Jim Henley reads blogs through a feed reader. Now, he’s working on customizing his reading experience by creating some “edited feeds” via Yahoo Pipes that eliminates recurring posts that he doesn’t like: Open-Thread-Free Eschaton, Outside the Beltway — Substantive (no caption contests or music videos), and Poliblogger Gringofied (no Latin American [...]

Newsweek presents a devastating essay by Clifford Stoll explaining why this newfangled Internet thing is unlikely to catch on. After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy [...]

Chris Clarke provides an excellent template for aspiring bloggers to emulate. A sampling: This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers’ attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically [...]

Bernard Chazelle explains “the technical part” of Eric Clapton’s classic “Layla.” Played here with an assist from Mark Knopfler, for those in need of a reminder. The intro and chorus follow the progression of “All Along the Watchtower” (i-VII-VI-VII-i, ie here, Dm-C-Bb-C-Dm): one of the most common chord sequences in rock (0:27-1:10). The song is [...]

Joshua Foust continues to call attention to widespread and institutionalized child rape — mostly man-on-boy — in Afghanistan, this time with a report that Canadian soldiers had been quietly told to ignore the practice because we needed the cooperation of the leaders doing the raping. Steve Hynd, naturally, wonders why this isn’t widely reported and [...]

Andrew Sullivan has been blogging nearly ten years now and notes “it’s grueling month after month being responsible for up to 300 posts a week.”  So he’s taking a month off to avoid burn-out. Which is fine, of course.  Sully is as prolific as any blogger out there.  Indeed, Jim Henley argues, he likely blogs [...]

“I think it would be awesome for Andrew Sullivan if all the documents end up proving that Barack Obama is Trig Palin’s father.” – Jim Henley If you have no idea what the hell he’s talking about, your life is richer for it.

Doug J draws our attention to a new Fox poll suggesting career options for Sarah Palin: About a third of Americans think the best job for Palin is homemaker (32 percent), while nearly one in five see her as a television talk show host (17 percent). Vice president of the United States comes in third [...]

In response to a commenter’s assertion in my Police Taser Deaf, Retarded Man post that “officers are killed in the line of duty are the time,” Jim Henley retorts, “Define line of duty and all the time.” Kelley Vlahos does just that in a piece for The American Conservative.  The numbers are surprising: According to [...]

Reflecting on the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, Megan McArdle wonders why the space program lost its momentum.  Jim Henley reckons it’s because “space travel is expensive, dangerous, unprofitable and (medically, biologically) kind of” problematic. I’m old enough to have been alive for the moon walk but too young to remember [...]

Andrew Sullivan is back from vacation and writes, As for me, it is hard to describe the experience of the long-distance blogger who takes a short rest for a while. A few will know – Mickey, Glenn, and Josh come to mind. Your brain feels like an arm after it’s liberated from resting against a [...]

This profile of Andrew Sullivan in Intelligent Life by his friend Johann Hari is quite good.  This ‘graph is especially noteworthy: Sullivan is often accused of flip-flopping according to political expediency, but it’s revealing that almost all the later tensions in his thought are prefigured in his writings about Oakeshott from his early 20s, recently [...]

Nancy Lebovitz cites a Michael Lewis piece in Vanity FairQuarterly Journal of Economics which in turn cites a loosely related 2001 study in the  to conclude that a major cause of the global financial crisis was that the key institutions were run by men who are much more risk oriented than their distaff counterparts. I [...]

Jim @ The Unholy Rouleur makes a trenchant observation in a post mostly about something else: There was a good Army recruiting ad a little while back in the “Army Strong” recruiting campaign that summed up the Western soldier’s ethos better than anything I have ever heard before or since. The ad’s argument, paraphrased, was, [...]

Hilzoy is tired of hearing about “socialism” and “class warfare” just because Barack Obama is raising the top marginal tax rate from 35 percent to 39.6 percent.  After all, we had much higher rates under John Kennedy and even Ronald Reagan, two legendary tax cutters.  And rates are higher in most of the developed world, [...]

I’d like to nominate the Jim Henley-coined word “Barastroika!” as the best new word of 2009. Someone might top it, but it’s going to have to be a hell of a word.

Will Wilkinson passes on Bart Wilson‘s observation that, “fair is one-to-one untranslatable into any other language.” Jim Henley, blogging into the Google Reader comment share ether, retorts: I remember the days we were assured there was no word for ‘freedom’ in Russian. That was bullshit. ‘There’s no one-to-one translation of *fair* into other languages’ sounds [...]

Christopher Hitchens has started a campaign to call Mumbai Bombay again,  generating responses from Ezra Klein , Tim Fernholz, Isaac Chotiner, DJW and others.  The debate surrounds the history of colonialism and religious intolerance prompting Jim Henley to note, via a Google Reader comment, “Fellow doesn’t get that the imperialism part is where he assume [...]

Matthew Yglesias published Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats way back in April but some of the reviews are just now hitting the ‘net. Jim Henley‘s is in Reason and entitled, “Between Iraq and a Soft Place – Democrats counter with a kinder, [...]

After following the rapidly developing news of the financial crisis and the efforts of the Fed and other U.S. agencies to prevent the onset of Great Depression Part Deux, I still honestly don’t know what to think.  My inclination, however, remains skeptical.   Jim Henley‘s had the best line on this so far: “Wouldn’t it save [...]

There’s quite a bit of thoughtful discussion–as opposed to knee jerk reactions–out there on the execution last night of Crips founder “Tookie” Williams. Conservative Ed Morrissey explains why he’s opposed to capital punishment even in case like Williams’ but publishes an interesting letter from a prosecutor explaining why the added deterrent is needed. A snippet: [...]