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Murder, He Lied

Ross is right to come down on Ezra for reckless and irresponsible hyperventilating on health care. But let me dot the i here. Ezra Klein kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy by accusing Lieberman of being “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to . . . . Continue Reading »

Beyond Möbius Bagels: Twisty Bagels

Rarely do Joe Carter and MAKE Magazine point me towards the same online curiosity . The intersection of topology and breakfast must have considerable ecumenical appeal. I’m going to turn Hart’s challenge around, however: now that you know how to create two interlocking bagel-halves by . . . . Continue Reading »

Unity through Beauty

Longtime readers know of my obsession with mathematical beauty, so it should come as no surprise to find me hopping up and down most eagerly and pointing you towards Matthew Milliner’s very immodest proposal in Public Discourse. My only quibble with the article is that the proportion of . . . . Continue Reading »

Sayonara, Weber!

Via Tyler Cowen, a paper by Davide Cantoni  casts some doubt on the efficacy of the Protestant Ethic: Many theories, most famously Max Weber’s essay on the ‘Protestant ethic,’ have hypothesized that Protestantism should have favored economic development. With their . . . . Continue Reading »

Absolut Absolutism

Our Ivan Kenneally unloads on Obamacare in The Weekly Standard: If one were to take seriously the central premise of Obama’s ersatz science of politics—the distinction between political facts and moral values—the inescapable conclusion is that our president turns out to be a . . . . Continue Reading »

Universality Is Not the Issue, Dude

I hoped I could prove this with a link, but back during the presidential primary race, I told at least one person that, when it came to the health care debate, not universality but comprehensiveness was the issue. You can imagine that a pomocon has an ingrained or inherent dislike for . . . . Continue Reading »

Demystification and Legend

Bryan Wandel has a good blog post here . Short, insightful, and well worth the read. One quibble however: Without accounting for the relationship between these two, Weber’s demystification (and ours) only regards the logical explanation of things, and not the participation and commitment that . . . . Continue Reading »

Scientific Americans

My review of Yuval Levin’s excellent and thought-provoking book, Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy , is up now at First Principles. Yuval’s closing exhortation to conservatives, to write more clearly, probingly, and persuasively about human dignity, is problematic, . . . . Continue Reading »

Newton and Bacon

My rabid pro-Leibniz partisanship notwithstanding, I have to give kudos to Thomas Levenson for his article on the faith of Isaac Newton over at Killing the Buddha. The article closes with a somber reminder: Hence the pathos, the danger that I think Newton himself glimpsed. There is a serious . . . . Continue Reading »

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