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“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 […]

English has two main words for people one knows — acquaintance and friend. Russian has three: znakomyy, which has the same root as acquaintance, droog, which is generally translated as friend, and priyatel’, the root of which is the same as the root of the Russian word for “pleasant”; priyatel’ thus means something like “someone […]

Thanks to Dan Gifford and Fred Kong for passing this along.

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.)

This lyric’s a bit late as yesterday was a bit hectic. In that vein, I thought it was about time to post a song by The Police. Not a Sting song, mind you — there’ll be a time for that another Sunday — but a Stewart Copeland riff on a crazy day: On Any Other […]

One quick note from sunny Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I’m running back and forth from spending time with my family, attending the New England Political Science Association (where I took part in an enjoyable roundtable on Randy’s new book as well as presenting new work of myown) and attending my 15th high school reunion (conveniently […]

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 […]

Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to sue a company that is distributing Arnold Schwarzenegger bobble-heads. Schwarzenegger’s claim is not unprecedented, even among political leaders: The Martin Luther King, Jr. estate successfully blocked the distribution of busts of King; I discuss the case in my Freedom of Speech and the Right of Publicity article.      But as I […]

Clayton Cramer writes: I was reading through John D. Cushing, ed., The Earliest Printed Laws of North Carolina, 1669-1751, and I found [this item] at 2:146 from John Locke’s 1669 Fundamental Constitution of Carolina. . . . 80th. Since multiplicity of comments, as well as of laws, have great inconveniences, and serve on to obscure […]

I’m with Glenn Reynolds on this.

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 […]

Jonah Goldberg makes some good points on this. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.)

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 […]