Since I’ll be seeing Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in IMAX 3D (!) one week from tonight (get your ticket and rally on the top floor of the 68th and Broadway AMC Loews at 9pm for the 10pm show on Thursday, July 23 if you want to join me), I will have to miss [...]
One owes a certain allegiance to people supporting good causes — such as punk rock — even when they stumble. And then there are atrocities so unforgivable, though committed by people whose basic intentions you might admire, that you must speak out against them.
The punk director Jem Cohen created one such atrocity a decade [...]
It’s Bastille Day, at least for a few more minutes as I write this, and if now’s not the time to flaunt my radical side a bit more, when is?
I noticed an ever-growing number of alternate-history novels at the Strand recently — a reminder that this branch of literature, more than scientific speculations, looks increasingly [...]
I wonder how the new, tougher punishments for online political misinformation that Kyle Smith fears Cass Sunstein will encourage would affect things like this semi-comedic enraged rant (pointed out by Helen) about Sunstein himself, Martha Nussbaum, and Nussbaum’s thirtysomething replacement in Sunstein’s life, Samantha Power?
I wouldn’t mind higher standards for gauging misinformation, really, even altered [...]
I just wanna say what all my smarter readers are thinking: Cheney and the CIA were plotting to kill al Qaeda leaders? Secretly?! An outrage! Thank goodness the Democrats are putting a stop to that.
Yeah, civilization’s gonna be just fine.
I am surely far from the only person to think that if Palin’s next move is a Playboy spread — and surely they’ve called to offer her millions, because they always try — I can forgive her for abandoning her post as Alaska guv and thereby perhaps convincing people she could never tough it [...]
I’m headed out the door for an early-morning bus to DC, not merely to see wondrous girlfriend Helen Rittelmeyer but for a whole Rittelmeyer family reunion. While I’m in the area, though, I think I should try offering the DC establishment some advice (not to be confused with offering the DC Comics establishment some [...]
Drudge still has that photo of Obama seemingly checking out a Brazilian teen’s butt atop his site, even though ABC has shown footage suggesting that Sarkozy noticed her but that Obama was innocently turning to offer his arm to that other woman descending the stairs behind him. One of my co-workers suggests that this is [...]
•NYT reports the econ downturn has sparked a new flood of people from Ireland into Bronx and Queens, as was the norm before their own economy started taking off in recent years — this’ll mean a lot more Irish-accented bartenders, like when I first got to NYC, I suspect. Indeed, I just noticed yesterday that [...]
I didn’t think there were any poor people left who were able to afford living in Manhattan, but my office looks out on Broadway and on the terrace of an apartment occupied by what appears to be a classic dysfunctional family, featuring only a fat, red-faced mom and a boy with the near-mandatory white-trash overly-thick [...]
You may recall that I set out to buy The Case for Big Government, having promised the author, economist Jeff Madrick, I’d read it — and on my first Barnes & Noble foray to find it instead found and bought The Forbidden Apple by Kat Long, which later turned out to cite me in an [...]
I’ll happily take “chaotic” markets over the Pope’s vague vision of some centralized global regulatory body with “human-centered” goals (as opposed to dingo-centered ones, maybe? or as opposed to leadership by sentient piles of money and nineteenth-century cartoons of plutocrats?). Division and competition are good, unity and control by regulators bad.
The Pope’s latest wading into [...]
Freedom tends to occur when government is temporarily immobilized, sometimes by orderly checks and balances, sometimes just by stupidity and gridlock. Thus, the last thing I want is an end to the 50/50 Democrat/Republican split that has notoriously kept the New York State Senate from being able to do anything (including resolve which if [...]
Thanks to Ken Silber, here’s the audio of our Debate at Lolita Bar one week ago between TakiMag editor Richard Spencer and Sanctity of Marriage Handbook author/health reporter Bryan Harris on the question “Is America Economically Doomed?” Scary stuff — and an excellent starting point for this blog’s purportedly more rapid-fire, pithy phase, if I’m [...]
Libertarians, I fear, are often too quick to think that “personal” and “economic” liberty go together as naturally in everyone else’s minds as they do in libertarians’ minds. Thus they sometimes end up being tin-eared about the broader political culture, which is dominated by the right and left, and think we’re winning even when [...]