Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2743

Global Warming = More Camping

by Patrick Appel

Manzi tallies points in his recent climate change to-and-fro with Bradford Plumer et al. I missed Mike Konczal's contribution until just now. He notes that Nordhaus tried to calculate non-GDP consequences of global warming by comparing how much the population enjoys skiing (which warming will decrease) and camping (which warming will increase):

There's something kind of oddly endearing to framing the future ofhow much carbon we are willing to put in the air and how much...

"The Summer's Best, Most Disappointing Blockbuster"

by Chris Bodenner

Christopher Orr reviews Christopher Nolan's latest:

[I:]n this end, it may be Inception's greatest strength, its precisionengineering, that also proves its signal weakness. Nolan has alwaysbeen a nimble, meticulous director, but his best work has exceeded suchtechnical virtues. His first major film, Memento, may have taken theform of a gimmick movie, but it transcended its own structuralingenuity to become one of the most unique and resonant tragedies ofthe past 25 years. His...

Benjamin Jealous Again

by Dave Weigel

Ta-Nahesi Coates pushes back on my "NAACP tea party resolution backfires" theory:

To the extent that the NAACP has, as Dave says, "failed," it isbecause the arbiters of facts have ceded ground, and reporters andwriters dutifully, and uncritically, dispense the notion thatan organization which helped birth modern America has "a long historyof...racism." But it also fails because there is very little pushbackon this notion from "sensible" liberal writers. (I don't include...

Limited Alliances, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

Noah Millman wonders whether economics should remain the primary focus of Libertarian politics:

I would argue that, over the past thirty years, there has been avast increase in appreciation of the importance of free markets acrossthe political spectrum. Yes, government spending has spiked way up inthe past two years as a consequence of the financial crisis and therecession (TARP, ARRA) – but discretionary non-defense spending is still much lower as a percentage of GDPthan it...

Why America needs Gene Weingarten

by Dave Weigel

It's just a happy coincidence, I guess, that he publishes this as I get ready to polish off a week of blog posts.

[T:]here are no real deadlines anymore, because stories are constantlybeing updated for the Web. All stories are due now, and most of theconstipated people are gone, replaced by multiplatform idea triagespecialists. In this hectic environment, mistakes are more likely to bemade, meaning that a story might identify Uzbekistan as "a subspeciesof goat."

Fortunately, this...

Norm, we have to go back -- to the future!

by Dave Weigel

Ed Barnes has the lede of the day, if only by accident: 

The chairman of the Minnesota Republican
Party called Thursday for a massive, eleventh-hour investigation into
allegations of illegal voting by felons in the state's bitterly
contested 2008 Senate election.

OK, somebody help me with this. "Eleventh-hour" means, basically, in the final stages of something. The shot clock is ticking down. The egg timer is about to ring. The video is almost done buffering. And so on. So how do...

Mental Health Break

by Patrick Appel

Ferris Bueller + Fight Club = Genius:

(Hat tip: Kottke)
















Jason Kottke - Health - Sports - Submission Fighting and MMA - Martial Arts

On Not Becoming Unhinged, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I hope the couple who are struggling with their sex life after using the NuVa ring have gotten off of hormone-based birth control altogether. Many women experience a nosedive in desire when they are on that stuff. The real way hormonal forms of birth control work (for many) is by making the woman not want to have sex. Some reading on this.

Another writes:

I almost fell out of my chair when I saw the note from the fellow whose wife has pain with intercourse...

How we'll cover 2012

by Dave Weigel

The heart-achingly moronic "spat" between Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney tells us how. The rundown, if you can stand it:

THURSDAY: Anonymous aides to Mitt Romney tell Mark Halperin that Palin is "not a serious human being" and will be in trouble in a debate where the "answers are more than 15 seconds long."

FRIDAY, 6:47 a.m.: Politico's Andy Barr publishes comments from "a longtime Palin aide," who gets eight paragraphs to unload on Romney and pump up his/her boss: "She's not a...

A Thousand Cuts, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

The first reader quoted in this post e-mails again:

I agree that it would be better if the bureaucracy had some incentive to save money, and being allowed to keep saved money, to use for some other need in another year, is vastly better than flushing money near the end of the budget year. When I was in my Master of Public Administration program a few years ago, I learned about how the city of San Diego had taken that approach, and it does work. Whether it works in a time when...