Read Later Font Size Print You have read: 0 / 8 free articles in the past 30 days. Already a subscriber? sign up for unlimited access for just $34.97Sign me up TRB FEBRUARY 18, 2013 BY TIMOTHY NOAH The current debate over gun control is one of several signs that liberalism is back, sort of.…

Photo by Win McNamee / Getty What I want for Christmas is a new Republican Party. Or I’ll take the old Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, or George W. Bush. What I don’t want is the Republican Party we have today. As former George W. Bush and John McCain adviser Nicolle Wallace…

View this image › I remember the moment when I realized exactly how lucky I was to work in the 30 Rock writers’ room. It was very late at night on Nov. 5, 2008 — late enough that it was already Nov. 6. I’d been a writers’ assistant at the show since July, tasked with keeping track and making sense…

Fad du jour on Twitter is #welovemacruby , echoing a call posted here to bring MacRuby to iOS, calling it to Apple’s attention through the usual process of posting duplicate feature requests to bugreport.apple.com . Please don’t. This is as bad an idea as I’ve heard in some time. The petitioners are…

hide captionProfessor Stephan Lewandowsky HIV does not cause AIDS. Smoking does not cause lung cancer. And burning fossil fuels does not contribute to global warming. What do these three statements have in common? They’re all rejections of well-established scientific consensus, and recent findings…

What does it mean to be 'privileged'? http://t.co/KnBnzgaM

Great thoughts on the importance of gender balance by @Mike_FTW. A problem even bigger in tech than design I think. http://t.co/V3Zk0ujP

Update: See this post for a free ePub eBook version of this long post. A very odd essay from a 1922 issue of The American Magazine that seems to go against the general grain of most of the articles published then. There is also no name attached to it. American1922440b Why I Quit Being So…

The Cold War Part Five, or why I should never attend high school sporting events I’m at the top of the bleachers, arms folded and feet up. If you know me, you know I’m probably thinking about how impressed I am by exactly how hard I look. If you don’t know me, you probably are now deterred from ever…

"On gun violence and how to end it, the facts are all in, the evidence is clear.." http://t.co/FXifzs0N

In July, 2010, Kyle Strode, a forty-six year-old chemistry professor from Helena, Montana, ran the Missoula Marathon. Completing the 26.2-mile distance in two hours and forty-seven minutes, he placed fourth out of thirteen hundred and twenty-two finishers, and won the masters division, for entrants…

Remember that elementary-school exercise, “Opinion or True/False”? The point was to differentiate claims that were debatable from those that weren’t. Skip to next paragraph So in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn. , let’s try a little example. How would you…

Announcing Wednesday that he would send proposals on reducing gun violence in America to Congress, President Obama mentioned a number of sensible gun-control measures. But he also paid homage to the Washington conventional wisdom about the many and varied causes of this calamity — from mental health…

You may have heard the news that the independent bookstore is dead, that books are dead, that maybe even reading is dead—to which I say: Pull up a chair, friend. I have a story to tell.

[Content Note: Rape Culture] Lately, I've been reading a lot of comments on the interwebs from genuinely nice guys who want to know how to be good feminist allies in this shitty rape culture world we live in. And it's a more complicated question that it looks, since there's a lot of conflicting…

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Daniel Inouye "My father just looked straight ahead, and I looked straight ahead, and then he cleared his throat and said, 'America has been good to us. It has given me two jobs. It has given you and your sisters and brothers education. We all love this country. Whatever you do, do not dishonor your…

There has been yet another mass shooting, something that now seems to occur on a monthly basis. Every time another tragedy like this occurs, gun advocates make the same arguments about why we can’t possibly do anything to restrict the weaponization of our culture. Here’s a guide to what they’ll be…

The day before Thanksgiving, Loudoun County elementary school principal Kathleen Hwang died. She was trying to cross a road in her Sterling neighborhood. How should we react to such a tragedy? Certainly we should mourn the loss of a beloved member of the community. But can we also learn from this…

This is awesome. “@jmergy: ReadWrite – Let’s All Shed Tears For The Crappy Startups That Can’t Raise Any More Money http://t.co/PhYNLntk "

The other day CNN let some dude named Joe Peacock vomit up an embarrassing piece on its Web site, about how how awful it is that geekdom is in the process of being overrun by attractive women dressing up in costumes (“cosplaying,” for the uninitiated) when they haven’t displayed their geek cred to…

A professional thinker named Thomas Hobbes got it into our heads for an embarrassingly long time that our ancestors were pitiful, lonely, mean people. Three and a half centuries later Hobbes is still revered for his smarts, even though he’ll always be most famous for that unfortunate soundbyte in…

Skip to main content Wed May 23, 2012 at 12:27 PM PDT by rlegro Bloggers on up to luminaries like former Nixon White House lawyer John Dean have spent a great deal of time demonstrating how Scott Walker is more Nixonian than anything else: Secretive, conspiratorial, mean-spirited, two-faced and…

Go to home page Topics: George W. Bush, Iraq, Katrina, Republican Party, Tom Delay, TomDispatch.com, Life News, Politics News I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who planned for a public-service career in Republican politics. But I am a Republican no longer. There’s an…

Daniel Weeks Much has been said by politicians and the press in this campaign. In three presidential debates alone, we've heard the two contenders for our nation's highest office speak of tax cuts, deficits, jobs, and the middle class literally hundreds of times. But much has also been left unsaid.…

Read: 10 Ways Walmart Destroys US Manufacturing, and with it, good-paying jobs http://t.co/pZvIkROL #uppers

In August I worked full time at a start up in San Francisco, a gaming company in the financial District. For reasons I outline at the end of this recollection, I cannot name the company or use the real names of anyone in the office I discuss. I can say that ironically, months before working there, I…

By Chelsea Fagan Read more » It starts with the high school kids. You see them out at the mall, scowling at things, drinking their energy drinks and just generally being assholes in front of the Pacsun or the Hot Topic. You think, “God, what irritating little warts. Good thing I was never 15,” and…

Are you male, work in digital, & think sexism isn’t a big deal in our industry? If so, you MUST read this http://t.co/4AtITmQT by @KuraFire

Perhaps you've heard of neither Gawker nor Reddit. That would make you (a) isolated from internet culture and (b) quite arguably lucky. But if you've heard of either of them, then you've probably heard about the internet-drama swirling around them in the last week. Here's the bullet: Reddit is a…

Yes, yes, it’s unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change. Men and women in white lab coats tell us—and they’re right—that many factors contribute to each severe weather episode. Climate deniers exploit scientific complexity to avoid any discussion at all. Clarity, however, is not…

As I sat stranded in a friend’s Manhattan apartment, watching nature make a mockery of my plans, I had a hard time tearing myself away from local Channel 4’s coverage of what New York's Governor has called “Sandy’s fury.” Sopping beachfronts were swarming with reporters barely able to stand in the…

Stop thinking that your inability to accommodate [an abusive person] is the problem. http://t.co/P9FioWHT Took me a long time to learn this.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! If you live under a rock, on Ada Lovelace Day you’re supposed to blog about women who’ve inspired you in STEM careers. And so you might be asking yourself, why the fuck are we talking about Angelina Jolie? The answer, of course, is the seminal American film Hackers. Angelina…

The latest wave of Muslim hysteria and violence has now spread to over twenty countries. The walls of our embassies and consulates have been breached, their precincts abandoned to triumphant mobs, and many people have been murdered—all in response to an unwatchable Internet video titled “Innocence…

Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced…

Let’s just start off by saying I am sure I am about to piss a lot of people off. Know what I think about that? Um, nothing really. If what I am about to say is “shocking” to you, then really, you never knew me. I am sure my “friend” count is about to drop – ahhh, fuck you. If you read this, and say…

On Wednesday night, I arrived at the Hilton Doubletree in Washington DC after an intense day of meetings ready to do a few more hours of work. When I got to the desk, the clerk told me that the hotel was oversold. I raised my eyebrows. The news worsened. Not only were all nearby hotels fully booked,…

It's hard for people to think rationally about crime. If five children die in a tornado, it's barely a headline, but if those same five kids die at the hand of a serial killer, it's a nationwide crisis, and mothers start attaching tracking devices to their daughters. When death comes at the hands of…

This post is all I have to say about the Chick-Fil-A controversy. It sums up various posts on the issue and all the various points made by my friends and I. From now own, rather than spend time debating this issue person by person, I’m going to point people here. My hope here is to find common…