The other night I watched that new police drama Detroit 1-8-7 about homicide cops in Detroit. Throughout the episode (which, I should mention, I liked) there was a running theme about solving the problems of Detroit, namely that there’s no good single way to do it. People can’t fix the city’s problems just by growing [...]

Mark Kleiman proposes an alcohol tax to help close the deficit: I haven’t run the numbers carefully, but the back of my envelope tells me that tripling the Federal alcohol tax – still leaving it below Korean War levels in inflation-adjusted terms – would bring in on the order of $15 billion a year in net [...]

If you haven’t already watched it, I highly recommend The Walking Dead on AMC. The show, based on a comic book series, is about a small town sheriff who finds himself living in a zombie apocalypse. From then on he sets out to find his wife and son, who he stubbornly believes are still alive. In [...]

Rachel Beeler is an English and Psychology major at the University of Michigan who plans on entering the medical field after graduation. The end of the road is near, and the long, dreaded goodbye to the wizarding world we all fell in love with has begun. The seventh and final novel of the beloved Harry Potter fantasy series [...]

Last week MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, one of the network’s most outspokenly liberal commentators, was suspended* after Politico broke the news that Olbermann had donated money to a number of Democratic campaigns. MSNBC’s policy is that journalists like Olbermann have to first ask permission before donating to campaigns because, well, apparently it’s okay for journalists to make political contributions [...]

The week’s best links (and some from last week, too) that we didn’t get to: 1. The Space Shuttle was launched on its final journey yesterday. 2. Martha Nussbaum is making a case for the humanities. 3. What kind of cities do Americans want to live in? 4. The Chinese census is a monumental task. 5. Social [...]