Category: Current Events

A thoughtful round-up: 1. Hooray. It is almost never right to celebrate a death. Almost. 2. The speech. When listening to Obama’s statement in real time (at a tavern in Southern California, with my sisters and brother after a memorial service) I thought it might be too long and detailed for the circumstances. All the other big-screen TVs in the place, which had been carrying sports or reality shows, were suddenly silenced so that one carrying Obama could be heard. In that unlikely but representative setting, attention seemed to be flagging a minute or two before the president had finished speaking. But hearing excerpts on the radio as I drove home, I was more impressed by the craftsmanship and necessity of most parts

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He rails on Trump about 12 minutes in. It’s hysterical:

My friend Adam Sigel, who blogs at The Rupert Murdog, has just started a second blog titled A Florida Man. The premise is simple, but brilliant. Men from Florida do ridiculous things, and these things end up in the news. The articles always begin with “A Florida Man,” and Adam has generously decided to begin posting a new Florida Man escapade each day. Here are a few of my favorites from the blog over the past week: A Florida man thought his friends were playing a joke on him when the police informed him he was in South Carolina. A Florida man is seeking financial compensation for writing the popular sports fan chant: “da da da da da da, charge!”

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Two quick things: Matt Miller points out some obvious hypocrisy. This is worth reading: Remember that great scene in the 1980 film classic, “The Shining,” when the wife comes upon the typewriter of the Jack Nicholson character, who’s supposed to have been working night and day for months on his novel? To her horror, she finds thousands of pages on which Jack has typed, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” formatted in countless, crazy ways. Suddenly his suspected madness becomes all too frighteningly real. Well, debt limit mania has driven me to a similar frenzied state. If my wife came across my manuscript it would read, “The House Republican budget adds $6 trillion to the debt in

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But it made me laugh. And then I realized it might make someone else laugh. Via Ezra Klein‘s Lunch Break:

Given that I drink about five cups of coffee per day, I welcome this news: Numerous studies in recent years have reported that drinking coffee may be good for the cardiovascular system and might even help prevent strokes. Just last month, Swedish researchers announced results of a large study showing that coffee seemed to reduce the risk of stroke in women by up to 25%. But what about men?

I previously mentioned that I probably wouldn’t be subscribing to the NYT, as the prices are fairly inflated compared with other digital subscriptions. A couple additional thoughts: I’m surprisingly satisfied with the BBC iPhone app. It’s completely replaced the NYT as my mobile news source, and with a few exceptions (mostly the op-eds), it’s been just a good. I’m a little annoyed that individual blog posts count as articles on the NYT site. Some of the blogs I follow have as many as ten posts a day. If I read them all, I hit the maximum number of 20 articles/month within two days. This is causing me to (grudgingly) rethink my decision about whether or not to subscribe. I’m well aware that

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From Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things: Looking at linen. Looking at fish. Looking at a lab worker. Looking at a truck. Looking at soy sauce. Much more here.

Via Ezra Klein, a proposal to provide taxpayers with itemized receipts: I’m glad to see the Taxpayer Receipt gaining some momentum. The center-left think tank Third Way and the liberal journal Democracy have both joined up to promote it (and here), there’s an online tax-receipt calculator that you can test-drive right now, and Sens. Bill Nelson, Scott Brown and Lisa Murkowski have teamed up to introduce the idea in the Senate. So, hopefully, this dead-obvious reform — your grocery store has been hip to it for quite some time — is close to happening. For those in need of a quick refresher on the Taxpayer Receipt, the basic idea is laughably simple to implement but perhaps quite profound once it’s being done. As things

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From The Economist: NEARLY three-quarters of Americans wish China would “just hurry up and overtake America already,” according to a new survey by The Economist Simulation Unit, published on April 1st. Constant worrying about exactly when the superpower will fall into second place is causing anxiety throughout American society, the survey found. “Will it be 2015? 2020? 2025? I wish it would just happen, and then we could all stop agonising about it and get back to dentistry,” said Adam Barnes, a dentist from Iowa. The report examines in detail the relationship between the two countries and finds that in some important fields, China has already surpassed America. A summary of the findings is presented below. Even after googling it,

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