For those of you who’ve never read Leon Wieseltier’s (in)famous New Republic piece on Cornel West, “All and Nothing at All: The Unreal World of Cornel West” (originally published March 6, 1995), TNR has reposted it in full on its website. Famous line: West’s work is noisy, tedious, slippery… sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared. The more things change, the more they stay the same; West is more powerful today than

Gleaning from cyberspace some of the more interesting of today’s Enron “drifts” (and clearing my taskbar in the process), I give you… “Enron Bet on Global Warming!!”, SupplySideInvestor.com “Enron So Far,” Michael Lynch in Reason Andrew Sullivan (keep on scrollin’ down) and Virginia Postrel on The New York Times’ Paul Krugman and his prominent place in the Enron house-o’-cards… Hillary and the Enron moolah… “What Scandal?” The National Review’s Rich

The Somali Justice Advocate Center is calling on moviegoers to “boycott” Ridley Scott’s “racist” Black Hawk Down, FOXNews reports. I’d like to make a counter suggestion. What’s say, in lieu of an actual boycott, we each go see the film instead — immediately! twice! — as all free and interested people who wish to hold an opinion on it should do. Only then can we decide whether or not there’s

Taking the post-Post Modern stance (or perhaps “neo-modern?” “antepomo?” “High Modernist?”), Jonah Goldberg examines “factual correctness” in all its scare-quoted ontology: Well, now there’s a term for [post-Post Moderns] too. We’re just being ‘factually correct.’ The truth is just one more perspective

John McWhorter, writing in The New Republic, has a wonderfully insightful and provocative review of Randall Kennedy’s new book, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. He begins: No white person calls me ‘nigger,’ at least not when I am around. The white people with whom I come into contact seem aware that the word is today ‘the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language,’ as Christopher Darden

Writing in Reason, Ronald Bailey offers this cautionary bit with regard to worldwide environmental treaties: How costly is the Kyoto Protocol? Estimates vary, but a recent analysis published in Science this past November concluded that adopting the Kyoto Protocol would cost the United States as much as $125 billion annually. In addition, Worldwatch activists well know that Kyoto is just the first cut, because the reductions mandated by that agreement

Here’s the text of an email I sent to Instapundit, who’s joined with Heretical Ideas’ Alex Knapp in condemning prison rape as palatable punishment. ‘Course, they seem to be talkin’ in the abstract, whereas I was quite specific in my targeting. At any rate, I’m interested in hearing comments, so chime in, y’all. Here’s my original post. Here’s Alex Knapp’s response to that post on Heretical Ideas. Here’s my rejoinder.

The Weekly Standard’s J. Bottom points out how Rick Weiss of The Washington Post seeks to connect religious conservatives to the Taliban. From Thursday’s Washington Post: ‘In November, researchers announced that they had made the first human embryo clones, giving immediacy to warnings by religious conservatives and others that science is no longer serving the nation’s moral will. At the same time, the United States was fighting a war to

Sadly, after a 9-season run, a pop-culture icon will cease production. The Hollywood Reporter writes that the popular TV series “The X-Files” will end its network mission in May of this year, at the conclusion of the current season. Why the abrupt end? Well, “The Truth,” it turns out, wasn’t really “out there” afterall — but had simply slid from the keyring of “X-Files” creator Chris Carter and wedged itself

Well, here’s something you don’t hear everyday…. “Manuela Ruda is accused with her husband of murdering a 33-year-old man beneath a banner reading ‘When Satan Lives’. The couple then drank their victim’s blood before making love in one of two matching silk-lined coffins they slept in,” according to a story in This Is London. …Must be…Muskrat love…?