Carl Scott

Here’s a classic case of local interests pitted against national administrative despots: some Irish locals want to moderate the drunk driving laws, because the practical effect they have is to keep older rural citizens isolated in their homes at night, killing the pubs. Losing one’s . . . . Continue Reading »

First off, the comment thread to the part 1 resulted in something of an informal pomocon booklist. Here are a few of the more interesting recent titles from it, IMO: Richard Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Political Philosophy Deszu Korztolani, Skylark Richard McKirahan, Philosophy . . . . Continue Reading »

Very bad news. Bill Sakovich, the writer of what was the best single-foreign-country-specific blog in English that I’ve ever read, Ampontan, a blog on all things Japanese but especially its politics, passed away due to a suddenly-discovered stomach cancer this December 21.  I just found . . . . Continue Reading »

The holiday season was too busy for me to compile this sort of list, especially with a move to a new home thrown in, an event that always makes one ambivalent about book ownership anyhow. “Isn’t time to invest in a Kindle?” was the crack my younger economist friend made as we filled . . . . Continue Reading »

Me? I’m swamped with sweaty efforts to simultaneously move to a new house and bang a new syllabus into shape. Posting will be rare for a while. But you? You should rush to your local movie theater this instant to catch the second and third parts of the NY Metropolitan Opera’s simulcast . . . . Continue Reading »

Please, please, please, will someone at the next Obama press conference (surely there will be at least one of these before March Madness commences) ask him the following question? Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in . . . . Continue Reading »

Via The Arabist , I found this primer on the new Egyptian constitution, by one Zaid Al-Ali at Open Democracy . Very thorough, and plausibly seeking to lay out the good news and the bad, from a broadly liberal perspective. The summation: Altogether, in comparison with Egypt’s constitutional . . . . Continue Reading »

Sorry about the light blogging of late, especially Songbook-wise, but I’m movin’ to Newport News for a “new gig” and travelin’ meantime back to my Cali home. Thanks to a tip from a tardy commenter on my epic essay on social dance , however, here’s a ‘lil . . . . Continue Reading »

Which would be more depressing: eating at McDonald’s on Christmas Day, or working at McDonald’s on Christmas Day? If I were a Marxist, I’d say the latter.  If I were a libertarian defender of the Lochner decision, such as the author of this pretty-good and definitely . . . . Continue Reading »

Martha Bayles’s expertise, which besides her punchy prose is the main attraction of her Hole In Our Soul , extends beyond the p’s and q’s of American popular music, but also covers the impact various theories of modernism and art had upon the music’s development. She is . . . . Continue Reading »