Author Archive | Jacob Levy

The Bush administration has removed two members of the bioethics advisory council– two who favored stem cell research. The two were a medical ethicist and a biologist. They’ve been replaced by a neurosurgery specialist; a political theorist with a University of Chicago connection who writes about Montesquieu; and a political theorist who has started to […]

Aristide resigned.

May I confess something slightly embarrassing? I’m not, deep in my heart, convinced that Return of the King and Peter Jackson deserve to win tonight. Oh, I want them to win, mind you. It would be a gross injustice and blot on the Oscars’ (anyways-spotty) record if the Lord of the Rings trilogy failed to […]

Josh Chafetz is reporting that enough Senators have committed to opposing the FMA that it cannot pass (if they all stick to their positions).

This appears to be the moment to finally establish in everyone’s mind the deep fraudulence and corruptness of Ralph Nader’s various enterprises. Nobody has an interest in covering up for him now. See: Mark Kleiman, Jane Galt, Zach Wendling, Radley Balko. Jane’s post in particular sounds like the stories of many, many collegiate idealists I’ve […]

Matt Ygelsias: The real progress paradox isn’t “why doesn’t all our stuff make us happy” but rather, given that all our stuff pretty clearly doesn’t make us happy, how do we come to have all this stuff.On the personal level, when I got my first cell phone, I was thrilled with it. By a couple […]

Eugene is, I guess, too polite to say so in the post immediately below, but: when Ponnuru asked whether Eugene thought it was “impossible to devise amendment language that would block the federal and state courts from creating civil unions while allowing state legislatures to create them,” he was asking whether Eugene agreed with a […]

Kevin Drum asks: With the specialized exception of Eisenhower, every single other president has had at least 14 years between first winning political office and becoming president. George Bush had six. I just don’t get it. Sure, he’s a Bush, but even so how did he manage to convince the vast majority of the Republican […]

I just got a phone call from a certain beloved children’s educational television show (one that played a crucial part in my own graduation to literacy!), asking me whether there was any reason to be nervous about using the song “London Bridge is Falling Down.” Edginess about nursery rhymes and old songs (e.g. “Eenie, Meenie”) […]

These have all been blogged by a number of other people, but I wouldn’t want those of you wh read VC and only VC to be denied either of these stories. 1) The engineering student who inadvertently posed as an economics professor 2) The “brown-skinned kid who showed up at the Nazi rally wearing a […]

Justin Katz has a response to my TNR argument about the Federal Marriage Amendment. Not much by way of rejoinder. But if the following matters a great deal: The problem with this arises when one realizes, having read the Federal Marriage Amendment dozens of times, that nowhere therein are the words “civil union.” then I […]

My new New Republic column is online. It discusses both the odd understanding of separation of powers in the FMA’s impossible attempt to ensure that only legislatures can create civil unions, and the new kind of intrusion on federalism that a federal command to construe state constitutions in a particular way would represent. See also: […]

When John Holbo has the time for serious blogging he’s one of my favorites to read. He apparently has had time the last couple of days, because he has one great post on conservatives in academia, and then another one, and then an impressive essay on the dirty hands problem. [UPDATE: Whoops. The second entry […]

I am, as I’ve said a number of times, strongly in support of gay marriage. That said, the decision by San Francisco’s city government to start issuing same-sex marriage licenses doesn’t at all please me the way it does Andrew Sullivan. San Francisco officials are obligated to implement California state law. The California mini-DOMA was […]

Because of a family conflict of interest (which I’m not going to discuss further, but I’ll note that there is one) I haven’t blogged much about what’s sometimes called the “War on Science.” ( I have written here, at TNR, registration required, on the general category of ‘gag rules’ of which several of the ‘war […]