Matt Yglesias challenges Lisa Schiffren’s assertion that “The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most...

There has been a lot of discussion lately about how to fund the kind of rigorous investigative journalism that exposes corruption and keeps public officials accountable. Rigorous reporting is a public good and an essential part of a healthy democracy.  The last few years have shown that the free ma...

Matt Yglesias explains why public transit should be free through an analogy: Say there’s no road between Washington, DC and Frederick, Maryland. You can go from the one place to the other, but it involves going way out of your way even though it could be a pretty quick trip on a direct road. What ...

Yesterday morning’s appearance on ABC’s “This Week” by new GOP chair Michael Steele is causing some consternation. This passage in particular: STEELE: What this administration is talking about is making work. It is creating work. STEPHANOPOULOS: But that’s a job. STEELE...

In the discussion section of Steve Verdon’s Obama the Fear Monger post, commentor Drew and I had a brief debate about the possibility of using TARP funds to create new banks rather than try to rescue old ones.  In today’s Wall Street Journal, Paul Romer of the Stanford Institute for Economi...

As everyone knows by now, Bill Kristol’s last NYT column appeared yesterday. Aside from the italicized footer “This is William Kristol’s last column,” it was unremarkable.  Which, most observers on the Left and Right seem to agree, was something it had in common with most of Kri...

The lovable young blogger who carried his weight on the Atlantic website talks about winter biking....

A weird incident over the weekend demonstrates the potential problems of institutional blogging. Matt Yglesias wrote a rather innocuous, inside-baseball post arguing that, although it’s “a neat organization,” Third Way is “incrementalist” (not to mention excrementalist)...

Monkey Cagers John Sides and Lee Sigelman rank the states on corruption and, as expected, Louisiana is at the top.  Surprisingly, Illinois is a relative piker, coming in 6th place but only 61 percent as much corruptitude: Matt Yglesias is convinced.   The problems, however, with the rankings are ...

Christ, the Pennsylvania primary isn't until April 22 and at its current rate, the Internet will have long since committed suicide, over and over and over again. Over the last week, many bloggers have gotten so bored with the lack of actual news that they have become werewolves. Specifically, the le...