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Shawn Lyttle, a colleague at Spy Briefing Books, did a very dangerous thing yesterday. He shoved into my hand a little book called Three Early Works, by H.L. Mencken. I opened it and felt that whooshing sound of my brain being sucked into the delirious world of the greatest American sociologist. For anyone who loves …
How much does the Internet contribute to our economic life? A lot, yes. But what if we tried to put a number on it? We love numbers, right? We imagine that we can slice and dice the world and look at everything on a spreadsheet, click a button and make it a pie chart, and …
The old adage that we don’t learn from history is true enough, but it needs amendment. Governments, in particular, don’t learn from history. That’s the conclusion I reach after a wild weekend ride with Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls, a delightful book by Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler. They scour history books from …
So you want to see Hunger Games when it comes out on Thursday at midnight? It’s not likely that you will get the chance. Tickets in my community have been sold out for weeks. In fact, the first 10 showings of the film are sold out. This disappoints me greatly because it is one of …
Ah, what a weekend, with blue skies, singing birds, budding cherry blossoms and the government’s announcement that it has totalitarian control over everything. Wait, what was that last thing? It was an Executive Order released late Friday that no one on the planet seemed to notice until about 30 hours later. It is unnumbered, but …
Anyone who read Dr. Suess’s “The Lorax” as a kid might dread the movie version. No one really needs another moralizing, hectoring lecture from environmentalists on the need to save the trees from extinction, especially since that once-fashionable cause seems ridiculously overwrought today. There is no shortage of trees and this is due not to …
Remember that battle over SOPA, in which the world’s largest websites beat back a congressional threat that would have changed the Internet forever? It was pretty obvious within a day after this Pyrrhic victory that the existing laws in place were enough to give the government the power to wreck the digital world. But how …
Few things in life are as satisfying as a transformative and implausible reversal of history that carries with it stern justice for wrongdoing and sweet victory for the side of truth and human well-being. When it happens, the period in which the wrong persisted without correction fades into memory as a mere parenthesis in the …
The story from The Daily swept through the Internet with blazing speed. The report: Criminals around the country are stealing an inordinate number of bottles of Tide laundry detergent. This is not because the criminals plan to go into the laundry business. There is not a “grime wave.” It seems that these Tide bottles are …
Sometimes — why not now? — you just have to reflect on what an amazing man Thomas Jefferson was. I mean, he really got the whole idea of liberty, maybe better than anyone before him, and far better than most people today. What a man! What a dream he had! I’m reminded of his bravery …