Why Newspapers are Dying: George Will Has Reached His Sell-By Date edition

Some of the problems faced by traditional newspapers (the MSM, dead tree dept.) are imposed from without.  It’s not anyone in particular’s fault that the emergence of the intertubes and related digital developments is destroying most of the economic pillars on which newspapers have prospered for a long time. But there are plenty of wounds [...]

Obama’s Nobel

All the obvious has been said already. I agree with John Cole:  it’s premature, but certainly not Obama’s fault.  And I find myself agreeing with Andrew Sullivan, as well (mirabile dictu — TL has something nice to say about an Atlantic blogger):  this prize bears witness to the enormous sense of relief that our friends [...]

It’s not that McArdle can’t read…it’s that she can’t (won’t) think: part four (and last, thank FSM).

Update: Hello and thanks to everyone coming over from Balloon Juice (and elsewhere.)  It took me a while to acknowledge y’all as I’ve been enjoying the strangely liberating experience of being on Amtrak and without intertubes for the last several hours. Also, picking up on the comment below by Joel, let me emphasize that I [...]

It’s not that McArdle can’t read…it’s that she can’t (won’t) think: part three

This is the third part of a ridiculously oversized tome on one example of what I see as a systematic failure on the right to engage science in any meaningful way. [Part one is here; part two, here] In part two, I noted that serial offender Megan McArdle was trying to defend a claim about [...]

It’s not that McArdle can’t read…it’s that she can’t (won’t) think: part two.

So:  on to the bill of particulars on McArdle’s recent attempt to claim the intellectual high ground in her ongoing attempt to convince us that we live in the best of all possible drug markets. [Part one is here] I’m not going to fisk the entire piece in question.  Instead, I’m going to focus on one [...]

It’s not that McArdle can’t read…it’s that she can’t (won’t) think: part one.

There is a lot of writing, especially in the self-declared higher reaches of what passes for public intellectual life on the right, about the need to use the rigor of this or that body of knowledge to see through to the truth of policy choices in areas like health care, climate science and so on. [...]

It’s not just reality that has a well known liberal bias…

Apparently, the Bible does as well* h/t Huffington Post via Sullivan. Not as off topic as you think:  I once heard Carl Hiaasen in an interview complain that the hardest thing about being an novelist of the weird in Miami is that reality kept on proving to be vastly more strange than anything he could [...]

For Good Times in Cambridge and in Princeton: More Newton and the Counterfeiter Goodness This Week

Just in case you had nothing to do with your copious spare time and wanted to hear something about Isaac Newton’s little known career as a cop and a death penalty prosecutor (detailed in that book, Newton and the Counterfeiter…(Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble,Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders,John Smith & Son)…that [...]

More Friday Links: Headlines You Wish You Had Never Read — Splendid Splinter edition

I mean, seriously.  I needed to know this? Image:  Caravaggio, “Salome with the head of John the Baptist,” before 1610.  And yes, sometimes I post stuff just so I can use a particular picture. Heh.

One More Link: Paul Krugman Explains It All Edition

Once again I missed the Ig Nobels — bozo, me, given the proximity to that glorious milestone in the academic year. But Paul Krugman was there, delivering a 24/7 lecture:  twenty four words of hopeless jargon from within one’s discpline followed by a Hillel-like* seven word account of that field. Here’s the transcript, in full. [...]