A friend of mine—an enthusiastic supporter of John McCain, or at least an enthusiastic opponent of Barack Obama, but otherwise a nice guy—forwarded a rather cute PowerPoint presentation that provided a rather snarky interpretation of the recent fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis. (I don’t know if the PowerPoint is available online anyplace—if I can […]

In a recent poll of 345 Kadima voters, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert triumphed over one of his fellow Cabinet members. Asked whom they would prefer to be Kadima’s next candidate for Prime Minister, the voters chose Olmert over the other minister by 8.7% to 5.8%. The only candidates the voters liked better than the […]

Perhaps things are just as bad in the rest of the world, but it seems to me that the Middle East is suffering from an epidemic of denial: denial of the Holocaust, of course, but also lots of less spectacular denials of generally accepted fact*. This phenomenon does not bode well for our happy little […]

Last week I attended the second day of a conference on “The Media as a Theater of War, the Blogosphere, and the Global Battle for Civil Society”. (Unfortunately, I missed the first day, which actually covered a lot of the stuff I was most interested in. My immune system and assorted pathogens disagreed with my […]

In the past, I’ve used Microsoft Word to write most of my blog posts; I like its spell-checking and formatting (as opposed to the primitive capabilities of Blogger.com’s built-in editor), and I especially like the “smart quotes” feature, which automatically inserts “real” quotes (like the preceding) instead of the tacky “telegraph-style” quotes you get otherwise. […]