Billy Paultz Reconsidered

My all time favorite newspaper headline appeared in the long-gone Philadelphia Journal, a sports-oriented tabloid that could best be described as a cross between the Philly Daily News and one of the colorful, scandalous London Fleet Street papers.
The story was on an economist from the University of Pennsylvania winning the Nobel Prize. It appeared during […]

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Matt Yglesias blasts the bulls-eye on the pistol-packin ex-Governor.
Yglesias was working off a column by Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ new house conservative (and a gargantuan improvement over the last one, Bill Kristol). Douthat makes the point that Palin was worked over unfairly because of her class and gender:
Male commentators will attack you for […]

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Perhaps the most important and influential space on the Internet is the “front page’’ of the Drudge Report. About two weeks ago, the lead item on that page was the following (typically blazing) headline: “2001 OBAMA: TRAGEDY THAT ‘REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH’ NOT PURSUED BY SUPREME COURT.”
The reference is to an interview Obama did with […]

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I somehow missed this, which happened late Friday, until today (Monday). “David Foster Wallace, writer of dark, manic irony, has committed suicide…” Reading that made air rush from my gut. It was as if I’d lost someone from my own family, which sounds ridiculous and celebrity-obsessed, like those simps who make a annual vacation of going […]

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Just happened upon this while aimlessly surfing, which reminded me of college, in Western Pennsylvania, a stronghold of the absurd and offensive practice of calling soda “pop.”
First, problems with the data the map represents:
1. It’s based on 120,000-some responses in a nation of 300-plus million.
2. It’s by county but not population; the “pro-soda” (read: sane) […]

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This column ran in the Sunday News Living Section March 30. It is posted here in honor of my kid’s high-school graduation.
I’d like you to meet my son.
That’s him over there, all feet and legs and contrarian hair, with the Jimi Hendrix T-shirt and the floor-sweeping pants.
Something of a free spirit, this […]

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This is an excellent piece about terrorism paranoia, but I probably wouldn’t be linking to it if it wasn’t written by the “Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies,” at Ohio State.

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