How I lost $100,000 In My Spare Time

Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Andrew Breitbart is offering $100,000 for anyone who can offer him the complete archives of Journolist, a private email list serv that’s been in the news. Since I’ve been outed as a member of Journolist, this prompts a few reflections, mainly that I could have made $100,000 if only the [...]

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Why Do They Hate Ezra Klein?

One of the interesting subplots of the recent drama of David Weigel and Journolist (the private list-serv where Weigel made remarks that led to him parting ways with his employer, The Washington Post) is the revelation of how much certain writers hate Ezra Klein, the founder of Journolist. (See this post by Jeffrey Goldberg as an [...]

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Republican Multiculturalism, The Director’s Cut

Over at the Globe and Mail, I look at the efforts of the Republicans to become a more multi-racial party. I had to cover a lot of ground in 900 words. Those who want to read the earlier, longer version (or “director’s cut”) can do so below: Historical memory might be on the wane elsewhere but [...]

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On Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel is leaving the Washington Post after some creep leaked off-the-record comments he made on a private list-serv. Matthew Yglesias and Adam Serwer  have both written superb blog posts that pretty much say everything that needs to said on the matter. But I want to make a few points that need to be stressed in the [...]

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G. A. Cohen: 1941-2009

I have an essay about G. A. Cohen in the June issue of the Literary Review of Canada. Here’s the opening paragraph: Gerald Allan Cohen was a product of the lost world of Canadian communism. His working-class parents were Jewish Marxists who toiled in Montreal’s garment trade. In 1945, When Cohen was four years old, [...]

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Canada’s Greatest Books

What are Canada’s best 100 books? This is a question Stephen Patrick Clare and Trevor Adams are hoping to answer by polling Canadian readers. They plan to sift through the results and publish the list of those that receive the most votes as Canada’s 100 Greatest Books, a kind of sequel to their fun 2009 [...]

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Conservatism as a Family Affair

  Over at Vanity Fair, James Wolcott is puzzled by the presence of Peter Worthington at the Frumforum site. Wolcott quotes a Worthington column on the World Cup which includes this observation, “And as a reflection of African ethnicity, well, maybe the vuvuzelas are the apex of cultural achievement.” Wolcott rightly describes Worthington’s column as [...]

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The Two faces of Paternalism

Historians of the American South, seeking to give a more nuanced picture of the region’s history, sometimes describe traditional racism as being “paternalistic” in nature. The idea is that that paternalistic ideas that African-Americans needed white guidance mitigated against the racism of the region developing into more extreme forms of race-thinking that were genocidal in [...]

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