In Praise of Folly

While the Middle East continues to struggle to topple dictatorships and establish the roots of democracy ( TNR Article ), at home we continu...

The Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago about a bipartisan group of Senators working behind the scenes to tackle the disaster tha...

Many scholars have been talking for years about the McDonaldization of the world, with U.S. "fast food"/consumer culture spreading...

The world stands in chaos today, from protestors across the Middle East, to renewed violence in Israel/Palestine (where a husband, wife and ...

Have you ever felt that photographs don't really capture the real you? Do you turn away whenever someone places you in the aim of their ...

Magnanimous Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has threatened to fire 1,500 public sector workers if the 14 Democratic State Senators who escap...

I am that odd sort of American who actually thinks about football as soccer, and the U.S. version as American football. Having long been a J...

The rube in the big city has long been a Hollywood staple , from Mr. Smith Goes to Town to Mr. Deeds to The Hudsucker Proxy . The protagoni...

In a post-Tuscon world ... little appears to have changed. In a Town Hall meeting in Georgia a few days ago, a participant stood up and aske...

Two events yesterday brought into acute focus the man/machine debate; at least for me. The first, reported widely, was the victory by IBM su...

Anderson Cooper has been getting lambasted by the media for days now, for the unforgivable sin of, gasp, calling a lie a lie. The lies, told...

I finally got around to seeing The Social Network last night and have to say that while it was a good movie, it wasn't anything earth sh...

In this blog, I often talk about conservative framing. One of their brilliant strategies was to relabel what had become expected government ...

Well, the Tea Party might be more than just a bunch of right-wing radical conspiracy theorists and racists after all. New Tea Party GOP cong...

A series of stories today show how crazy the country has gotten, and how crisis appears to bring out even more nut cases than America has al...

Wall Street darling and favorite of the commodified pseudo-ethnic chain movement Chipotle Mexican Grill is apparently in trouble as its hip ...

A few years ago, a documentary came out called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Will_Not_B...

The new year has started with a surge of populist democratic movements across the globe. In Tunisia, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was p...

This article provides interesting background on Ryan: http://www.thenation.com/blog/158010/paul-ryan-republicans-thinker?rel=emailNation . A...

Yesterday, I happened to catch most of the Republican response to the SOTU speech. One thing I found fascinating was the series of myths tha...

In preparation for the State of the Union address, Republicans showed up on the Sunday talk shows to warn that they seek cuts in all areas o...

News that astronomer signs are misaligned by as much as a month (due to "wobble" in the earth) has sent people into identity crise...

It is still unclear whether the shooting of Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was politically motivated, but it is clear t...

Obama announced yesterday that he is naming William Daley as his new Chief of Staff and will announce today that Gene Sperling will become t...

ESP has generally sat alongside UFO sightings, flouridation, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, life on Mars and the like, as the ra...

The House of Representatives will change hands today and already Republicans are getting ready to pay back their corporate sponsors ( http:/...

I often write in this blog about the social justice and empirical arguments against the "small government" discourse. I thought I ...

Some of us remember the age when kids should be seen but not heard, or maybe even not seen that much. Youth was to be lived freely, spending...

Michael Bloomberg has just announced that he is adding an opinion section to his financial news organization: http://www.salon.com/news/m...

The U.S. Census Bureau released findings today that show an expected shift away from Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and Midwest to ...

In the classic Stanley Kubrick spoof Dr. Stranglove , a mad general believes the Russians are contaminating our water to take over America. ...

A piece of good news emerged today as Obama finally came through -- ending Don't Ask Don't Tell and hopefully putting a first nail i...

As I contemplate the Republican victory in the election last month, it occurred to me what is at stake in a broader sense. I have often spok...

A Bloomberg poll on the eve of the election found that two-thirds of likely voters believed that, under Obama and the Democrats, middle-clas...