David Brooks seems to be making a curious, and curiously potent, argument about why Obama’s not possessed of a stronger lead — seeing as how he’s amply possessed of a stronger everything else. My lurid and amped-up summation of the answer runs something like this:
Famous sojourners of old — Sojourner Truth springs to mind — [...]

Psychology without Freud, economics without Marx, philosophy without Hegel: For disciplinary cheerleaders, this confirms intellectual progress. The cloudy old thinkers have made way for new scientific researchers. But at what cost? The past innovators shared a fealty to history. “We are what we are through history,” stated Hegel; and Freud, for all his biological determinism, [...]

Rod Dreher will just lurv this one. In a general sign of the horribleness of Time magazine and the culture at large, the hot new story is the mainstreaming of wild, nasty sex (with your husband or wife, of course) in Christian churches. For fans of crazy hot sex on the one hand and Christianity [...]

It used to be said that if The Cure made a happy album something had truly gone wrong in the world. It must now be said that if Tom Friedman is depressed, we’ve run officially off the rails on a crazy train. So yikes:
My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline [...]

Sorry, George Will. Nudging irritates me. When I think of nudging, I do not think of unobtrusively maximizing aggregate efficiency in a way consonant with free public choice. I think of this:

I think, I’m a man, not a number data point clustered within a statistically significant group! Nudging is only possible when you look at [...]

Kerry Howley has come back with an outstanding post on the culture/birthrates/tradition meme flying around the intertubes. I know it is outstanding because I agree completely with over 90% of it. It is always thrilling when I agree in such large amounts with a libertarian, so let me count the ways:
(1) “The conversion/inheritance framework assumes [...]

By way of playing catch-up on the Kerry/Will/Megan Natalism Debate, I’ll begin with this fundamental McArdlean insight:
Food is awesome, but it is culturally trivial.
Think for a moment — I know I did — about how often it is that big proponents of diversity resort or revert to culinary metaphors. The liberal utopia often appears to [...]

What happens to us when we can outsource and archive our memories? What’s the difference between technological recall and human remembrance? What do Jorge Luis Borges and Maude Flanders have in common? My attempt to answer all these questions and more is up now at The New Atlantis. Teaser quote:
Through technology, the alienation and systematization [...]

Matt Yglesias approvingly cites Kay Steiger:
Furthermore, I never really understood, if it’s such an important issue for families to all have the same names (because how would you know you belong to one another otherwise?) why it has to be the woman that changes her name. Why can’t the man? I’ve yet to hear a [...]