Author Archive | Tyler Cowen

Still apologists after all those years” — a review essay in Reason discusses and condemns modern historians who are trying to whitewash Communist history. I don’t know the field enough to have a truly informed opinion, but I can say that the essay is eminently readable, and seems thoughtful and incisive.

Reader and fellow lawprof James Leonard writes: While you were proceeding to decry free speech violations at GSU (a worthy endeavor), I investigated the more pressing issue of the status of the Channel Islands. It turns out the that the Bailiwick of Guernsery is a remnant of the Duchy of Normandy and consists of Guernsey […]

“Armed and Fabulous”: More about the Pink Pistols (who draw their name from a column by my friend Jonathan Rauch), “the first national gun club for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community.”

Someone forwarded to me this e-mail, which was sent to all students by the administration at Boalt Hall, the UC Berkeley law school: Folks: This semester we had an incident in which a guest lecturer made racist remarks during a class. The incident caused a great deal of hurt and anger in the students who […]

— and once-and-present brother — Sasha is now officially engaged to the lovely food-and-cat-blogger Hanah Metchis, of Quare (“The blog that doesn’t rhyme with ‘square’”). No, they didn’t meet through blogging. Best wishes to the happy couple!

Several people noted, taking varying degrees of umbrage, that “witches” is also the term used by people who belong to neo-pagan (I think that’s right) religious groups that are sometimes also known as Wicca. I’m aware of that; but as I think my posts made pretty clear, I’m talking about “witches” in the traditional sense […]

“He looked surprised”: Their eyes locked. Then Barbara Holland saw the barrel of the gun. She lay on the floor in her house after an intruder had knocked her down while pushing through her side door. While on her back, she drew a 9mm handgun from a holster on her waist. Her assailant’s glare suddenly […]

from Mark Kleiman. We academics can analyze anything! (Some say, overanalyze, but I don’t view it that way — Mark actually makes some very interesting points about the subject.)

I am continuing my work on cultural diversity, including my periodic trips to UNESCO. A central intellectual question for me is how national and regional feelings of identity can best be secured and strengthened, and in a manner consistent with existing instruments regulating the free trade of goods and services. I generally see the international […]

Knight-Ridder reports: As the insurgency and violence in Iraq intensify, the Department of Defense has proposed a new rule for most of the estimated 70,000 civilian contractors working in the war-torn region: They can’t carry guns. At the same time, a top Defense Department official this week acknowledged publicly for the first time that the […]

Reader Paul Forsyth points out that C.S. Lewis beat me to my witches observation by decades (not surprising — my point was pretty obvious). Forsyth quotes Mere Christianity, p. 26: But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did — if we […]

Where’s the (necessarily arbitrary) dividing line between Europe and Asia? Setting aside the obvious water boundaries, I understood that Europe included all the USSR west of the Ural Mountains, so the Eastern and Southeastern boundary was the Urals, the Caspian, plus the Soviet-Turkish border. But now it appears that Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan are being […]

D’oh! A federal drug agent shot himself in the leg during a gun safety presentation to children and his bosses are investigating. . . . “The kids screamed and started to cry,” said Vivian Farmer, who attended the presentation with her 13-year-old nephew. “Everyone was pretty shaken up,” Farmer said. “But the point of gun […]

A reader writes, apropos this post: “But part, I think, might be the tendency of some people — at least in some circles — ” In the spirit of light hearted Friday afternoon banter, I offer the following suggestion: You might, under some circumstances, evaluate, consider, or at least entertain the possibility of limiting, restricting […]

Hussein’s Information Minister was trying to arrange uranium purchase. From the Washington Post: It was Saddam Hussein’s information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as “Baghdad Bob,” who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade — an overture the official saw as a […]