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Showing posts from May, 2013

Cool Multimedia Projects

1. The NYT won a Pulitzer for this story . Really cool. 2. All of time, in a few clicks . 3. The flight deck of Discovery . 4. You need Chrome to look at this one, but it's still neat . 5. Cool documentary about the Cuban Missile Crisis . 6. Rather ordinary profile of Daft Punk commemorating their new album, but with some nifty graphics . Not sure how much of these things are just gimmicry, but they're worth checking out anyway.

The Conservative Reform Movement Has Little to Do With Policy

I ain't got no Nobel Prize, but I'm going down guns blazing Paul Krugman and Mike Konczal  team up again me and Jonathan Chait to argue that, despite mine and Chait's assertion of a conservative reform movement, there isn't much meat on their policy bones. There's something to that as far as the specific policies they mention (climate change, the danger of inflation), but I think they're rather missing the point. You see, whether some policy is labeled "liberal" or "conservative" is a rather fluid thing. As people have pointed out a gazillion times, Obamacare is basically indistinguishable from Bob Dole's 90s healthcare plan, developed by the Heritage Foundation and first passed by Mitt Romney. Yet the minute people associated that set of ideas with Obama, average Republicans instantly created an iron-hard belief that Obamacare represents the death knell of American freedom, and rearranged their policy views accordingly. T

Me-Related Link Roundup

This is mostly for my mother, but she's right that I need to be keeping better track of my stuff. To wit: 1. I got a piece published in Grist  for the first time, about DC food trucks and young conservatives . 2. Here's my print piece about "reformish" conservatives . Paul Krugman and Mike Konczal think I'm full of it. Response forthcoming. 3. Defending Paul Krugman from Clive Crook . Brad DeLong reprints . 4. Explaining why Michael Kinsley is wrong about austerity . DeLong kind of steps on my toes tone-wise , but in a fun way. 5. My debut on DC's sorry excuse for a gossip blog . Beware kids, get between me and my highlighter box and bad things will happen. The strangest thing about that is that it's actually quite a fair piece—she reprinted my email in full, and it basically deflates the story. The thing that strikes me is that this   is someone's job . Some media critics write really compelling stuff about vicious backstabbery

Revive Pedestrian Culture by Removing Stoplights and Sidewalks?

This is an interesting idea: I do walk to work nearly every day, and there's definitely something to this critique. However I do like the long sidewalks where I can zone out and pay attention to my book. Perhaps we should just ban private autos from the inner city altogether?

The Earth in One Long Strip

The Laundry Files

I just want to leave a brief note about a book series I just finished, Charlie Stross's "Laundry Files." As per my usual habit of late, I listened to them rather than reading. Good stuff ! They're nerd thrillers with a Lovecraftian horror gloss, very funny, very entertaining, well-performed, and passably written. It was interesting, actually, to see how Stross's writing improved over the series; the first one was towards the beginning of his career while the latest was only released last year. (Though there were still a few too many "The penny drops" for my taste.) It's a four-book series, so far—there's a kind of looming doom thing going over the later books that hasn't come close to happening by the end of the fourth book, The Apocalypse Codex . Word is that he's planning on a 9-book series with the Big Event (called Case Nightmare Green in the books) towards the late middle. Anyway, nothing much to say about these in particula

How to Be a Dad

Buried in the jokes here Ze Frank has my dad's style pretty much pegged: Something worth shooting for, should I ever have kids.

The Sierra Club Was Once the Victim of a Politically Motivated IRS Attack

The 1950s and 60s were about the apex of dam building in the United States, and the capstone of the era was to be turning all of the Colorado through Grand Canyon into a staircase of reservoirs. The bottom and top had already been drowned in the form of Lake Mead (created by Hoover Dam in 1935) and Lake Powell (created by Glen Canyon Dam in 1963) respectively—the two largest reservoirs in the country. Two more dams were planned for the heart of the canyon: one at Marble Canyon and one at Bridge Canyon . These dams got quite close to being built; I've explored the test tunnels drilled in the rock walls at the Marble Canyon site. The Sierra Club led the campaign against these projects, culminating in one of the most famous advertisements of all time, a full-page New York Times spread asking " Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can float nearer the ceiling? " In response, pro-dam forces got the IRS to suspend the Sierra Club's 501(c)(3) tax-exempt

Department of WTF, Orbiting Astronaut-Performed David Bouie Covers Bureau

Dig this:

Collected Links

I need to start doing these posts again. So here we go: 1. Soros versus Sinn on the "German question." 2. Cap and trade doing quite well in the Northeast . 3. The corporation as a command economy . 4. Dani Rodrik on the state of economics . 5. E verything You've Been Told About Radicalization Is Wrong

That DFW Speech Remixed

I quite liked this:

Humanity, You're Okay