Commenter Jaime A. Headden writes: So, Jason, let’s try and consider what taking “marriage� off the books and simply replacing that term with another less loaded one? What do you think would happen, as a thought experiment? I hate to do this, but I feel like I have to restate the question in a...

About Megan McArdle’s Private Life, here. Attempting, successfully I’d say, to deflect charges of a conflict of interest. But seriously: Have you ever talked to Megan McArdle? If so, did it ever enter your mind that she wouldn’t share her exact opinion, whatever it was, regardless ...

To Our Friends: We are deeply saddened and distressed that we, along with many others, have been the victims of what may be one of the largest investment frauds in history. We are writing to inform you that the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had $15.2 million under management with Bernard Madof...

Let’s stat with the introduction to Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub . It describes an elaborate future history, one in which the world — something like our world, we gather — has suffered a calamity: the papyralysis. The papyralysis has destroyed all paper on earth...

One concern about liberaltarianism is that libertarians will lose something important in the process. I’m not convinced that this is a very pressing concern. After all, liberaltarianism is a project that exists mostly in a few blog posts at the moment. It’s nothing like a voting strategy...

From one of my favorite blogs: The conversion of genuine libertarian groups into conservative groups is happening before our eyes. At first the libertarians decide they want conservative money. To get that cash they start to downplay the issues that divide libertarians from conservatives. Here and t...

A quick list. 1. Scare the conservatives on economic issues, if they’re not already. They need to realize that the wholesale abandonment of free-market economics will alienate a lot of people. In fact, it already has. 2. Scare the conservatives on social issues, if they’re not already. I...

Longtime commenter Charles writes, As to specifics, I’m not understanding the complaints about claims of “creating jobs�. Again, it may depend on how one defines terms, in this case “job�. I view the near-term objective as mainly getting money to people in distress. One way is via unemploy...

Do Humanlike Machines Deserve Human Rights? Good question: I’ve seen videos of the incineration of T.M.X. Elmo (short for Tickle Me Extreme); they made me feel vaguely uncomfortable. Part of me wanted to laugh — Elmo giggled absurdly through the whole ordeal — but I also felt sick ...

Hilzoy writes, [T]he position of most Republicans in Congress is fundamentally unreasonable. We are, after all, talking about a party whose new chair says that “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job”, which would, I’m sure, come as a surprise to this c...