Jonathan V. Last

While trawling the comments on a Volokh Conspiracy post on the voting ID requirements for nuns in the Indiana primary, I stumbled on this remark: “Presumably the nuns would vote Republican, so the ID requirement may help Democrats after all.” Something tells me the commenter . . . . Continue Reading »

One of the best bits of reporting I’ve seen during the coverage of the Holy Father’s visit is this fantastic Hank Stuever piece in the Washington Post . It’s an exposé on the giant clash within the American Catholic Church—is schism too strong a word?—over . . . . . . Continue Reading »

Having recently attended Jody’s Georgetown lecture on death and politics , I was primed for this Wired piece on Ray Kurzweil, who believes in AI, the singularity, and immortality. There’s all sorts of Skynet-ish goodness in the piece, but the most interesting (by which I mean . . . . Continue Reading »

I tend to maintain that, despite everything, the New York Times is a tremendous civilizational achievement. Yet sometimes (often?) it publishes bits of such revealing self-parody that you almost think the paper is pulling your leg. Exhibit #14,576 is this Peter Steinfels piece , headlined . . . . Continue Reading »

Wired has the most (un?) intentionally funny line I’ve seen all morning in this interview with Paul Ehrlich: Ehrlich, now head of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology, has always had a knack for seeing the big picture, even if his specific predictions haven’t always panned . . . . Continue Reading »

Anthony, you’re clearly on to something in noting that one of the key aspects of success, historically, with Best Picture winners is some modicum of box-office success. The great William Goldman summed it up best when he likened the Academy Awards to the American automotive industry. Imagine, . . . . Continue Reading »

I don’t know when they launched it, but the New York Times has put a very nifty graphical representation of box office returns up on its website. If you’re looking to waste an hour—and get a sense of how longevity and opening weekend have changed in importance in the . . . . Continue Reading »

Stephen Webb amusingly asks whether or not the High Church of Obama is a cult. At least Paul Krugman thinks so. Yesterday he said that the Obama campaign “seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.” Mind you, almost all presidential campaigns are, to some degree, cults . . . . Continue Reading »

The Farrelly brothers are known for their profitable, occasionally droll, gross-out comedies, notably Kingpin , Dumb & Dumber , and There’s Something About Mary . In 1999, they wrote and directed the disastrously earnest, and bad, film Outside Providence , based largely on their personal . . . . Continue Reading »

Over at The Campaign Standard, Jody seems to think that the Super Tuesday numbers on the Catholic vote leave his thesis that there is no distinct Catholic vote in tatters . I’m no expert, but it seems to me that Jody is being overly harsh on his own thesis. There’s actually much in the . . . . Continue Reading »