Recently finished reading Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton. I unreservedly recommend it to just about anyone interested in the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. Chernow is clearly sympathetic to Hamilton in his conflicts against Jefferson, Madison, and the other Republicans. Chernow does not overlook the faults of...
I think that Ezra Klein has it right, and Elbert Ventura quite wrong, on Hero, the new film from Zhang Yimou. If you haven't seen it, go now. The Ventura review contains several.
From the BBC, via Matt Duss: Rock band Queen, fronted by gay icon Freddie Mercury, has become the first rock act to receive an official seal of approval in Iran. Mercury, who.
We passed the 1000th Iraqi casualty today, but that's not really all that important. I, and I think most Americans, are willing to accept casualties in the service of a good cause. It's the whole "1000 Americans dead for no good reason" that bother me. Oddly...
Atrios reminds me of something I occasionally forget; that Andrew Sullivan is pond scum: Sullivan was literally concerned that the "decadent Left" was plotting treason against the country, desiring to.
Matthew Yglesias makes a crucial point that isn't made often enough: In other words, a second Bush term will not merely continue down the current unsustainable course -- it will.
For me, one of the most difficult political questions is the ethics of outing for political purposes. It presents a conflict between two important principles: 1)the the profound injustice of systematic discrimination against gay people and the immorality of public officials who are support it, and...
I'm sure our regular readers (if any) were looking forward to receiving the kind of in-depth, Geertzian interpretive analysis that only a long-time New York resident of two weeks could.
I must argue that my colleague, as well as the increasingly shrill Andrew Sullivan, have reached the right conclusion about the proposed constitutional amendments in the GOP platform for the wrong.
Via Brian Leiter, I see that some PBS show I've never heard of is showing an episode devoted to John Rawls. Leiter tells me that the host is a right-wing hack, which is unfortunate. The Guests are Samuel Freeman and Robert Talisse. The former is a Rawls student and squarely...
Redbeard's got himself a damn fine post this morning: Have you not heard of that comedian who spliced together news footage and cried "Whither is truth?" As many media figures.
For those who have never read it, the Toledo Blade series on "Tiger Force" describes the activities of a U.S. Army unit in Vietnam in 1967. The unit perpetrated several.