David Frum writes that the Republican strategy of non-cooperation was a huge loss for them, but that it’s not (entirely) their fault: “I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, [...]

If you’re like me when it comes to sports, you like a team with a less than perfect record (in my case, the Chicago White Sox) and hate the “best team” in the league who shall remain unnamed. It was a tough year for me and baseball, watching that team-that-won’t-be-named win the world series. I [...]

Harvard and Stanford now cost over $50,000 to attend. I’m not quite sure about Stanford, but I know with HArvard there are a lot of tuition cuts and ways of getting around paying the entire tuition so it’s somewhat of an exaggeration to say Harvard costs fifty grand. But what’s important is to note that [...]

I’m having trouble seeing how outlawing nude dancing will cut down on crime but legislators in Iceland just passed a law that does just that. (side question: how much strip-teasing is there in Iceland? I mean I know there is summer but aren’t winters really really cold?). The idea is that strip-teases encourage prostitution trafficking [...]

It occurs to me that if I’m going to do a series of blog posts to tell people about Buddhism, I should write one as a general introduction to Buddhism.  I probably should have posted that one first, but I didn’t, so I’ll do it today instead. Disclaimer: I want to clarify that I’m not [...]

Louis Menand at The New Yorker describes a growing critique of the field of psychiatry: The position behind much of the skepticism about the state of psychiatry is that it’s not really science. “Cultural, political, and economic factors, not scientific progress, underlie the triumph of diagnostic psychiatry and the current ‘scientific’ classification of mental illness [...]