“The state of Florida is squaring off in court with psychic pitchwoman Miss Cleo, trying to force her to prove she

Headline: Jetliner Lust Attracts F-16s. “A randy, drug-fueled romp in a New York-bound jet’s rest room sparked a midair terror scare that sent a pair of F-16 fighter jets scrambling, authorities revealed yesterday. But the red alert aboard American Airlines Flight 101 from London on Friday gave way to red faces when authorities discovered all the fuss was over two amorous British men. Police said the passengers, whose names were

“A British-born Muslim militant admitted Thursday to kidnapping Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl and said he believed the journalist is dead,” The Washington Post reports. “Officials dismissed the militant’s claim, and the Journal said it remained confident Pearl is alive.” ‘As far as I understand, he’s dead,’ Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh said in a courthouse in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, where Pearl disappeared on Jan. 23 while

Richard Bennett offers these great observations (over the course of several posts) by way of entry into the blogosphere porn wars: Radical feminist Diana Russell has tried to connect porn with rape by doing retrospective studies of rapists, claiming that they nearly all have big porn collections, but she’s never published this stuff in a reputable journal. Part of the problem is that retrospective studies almost always confirm the researcher’s

Capitalism Magazine’s Walter Williams writes that diversity is doublespeak for ideological confirmity: Diversity is simply the old racism in a new guise, spiced up with a touch of sexism. Diversity is a call for race-conscious decisions in hiring, promotion and college admittance policy. Diversity management success is measured by the numbers: How many minorities or women are employed, promoted or enrolled? Wrong numbers invite the wrath of the state. At

“Orchestras might be forced by European law to play music more quietly, according to a leading British musicians body. “The Association of British Orchestras (ABO) is fighting to be exempted from a European directive under consideration that would place limits on noise in the workplace,” the BBC reports. The directive has already been agreed by Britain and other EU member states and will receive a second reading in parliament later

Cathy Young has an outstanding Reason column on the “Deadbeat Dads” phenomenon: […] men who father children they can’t support are irresponsible – as are the women who have those children. But no conservative has ever bashed welfare moms as viciously as conservatives and liberals bash ‘deadbeat dads.’ Most welfare opponents stress that women on public assistance want to be self-sufficient but are trapped by a bad system; ‘deadbeat dad’

As part of its Black History Month coverage, The Nation has assembled an impressive list of essays its published in over the past 136 years. Some contributors: W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin… Here’s an 1866 essay by Octavius Brooks Frothingham, a minister and the author of several books on prominent abolitionists, in which he pays tribute to the passing of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s

I’ve solved the Rallying Point mystery, and I have to say….it’s like pulling the mask off of Batman! (Or is it, “The Batman”? “The Indigo Girls”? I get confused…) Anyway, The RP has a nice post on the new Creationism and its PoMo offshoots.

Jay Nordlinger’s latest NRO “Impromptus” column contains the perfect answer to a question I’ve been asking myself for some time now (in fact, I ask the question every time I find myself cheering for some Bush policy or other): How does a semi-hip, fiction-writing academic who teaches in a university English Department suddenly find himself mocking the Kyoto Protocol, or sneering at Noam Chomsky and Barbara Kingsolver? The answer is