…it seems that the United States government missed the day that it was supposed to learn one particularly important lesson: take responsibility for your actions.

Vice President Joe Biden may have whispered to President Obama today that the healthcare bill he was about to sign into law was a “big fucking deal.” Not two hours later t-shirts were made. It’s just another sign of how fast things move thanks to the internet. –Jasper Hart

At the risk of preaching to the choir hear I want to highlight this argument of the value of blogs by Alan Jacobs: To say that a magazine, or a set of magazines, or even a series of blogs are the chief instruments of your intellectual formation is not — or should not be — [...]

Last night I attended a talk by Suraiya Essack-Verachia on the Islamic headscarf (the talk was hosted by the Muslim Students’ Association – the other MSA – during their Islamic Awareness Week). Her goal was to disabuse her non-Muslim audience of their various prejudices about the headscarf, or hijab – for instance, that it is [...]

Dylan Matthews is a research assistant at the Washington Post, a president of Perspective: Harvard’s Liberal Monthly, and a biweekly columnist for the Harvard Crimson. He blogs intermittently at his personal blog, Minipundit. The US doesn’t have that many real national security threats. Great power conflict has become a thing of the past, and conventional [...]

NPR reports that Penn State professor Philip Jenkins thinks so: “”Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible,” Jenkins says. Violence in the Quran, he and others say, is largely a defense against attack. “By the standards of the time, [...]