Ross Douthat

Jayson Stark, on baseball's latest tarnished star:I'm willing to bet right now that Alex Rodriguez will join that Cooperstown missing-persons list -- no matter how many home runs he hits, no matter how he chooses to spin Selena Roberts and David Epstein's impeccably reported story on SI.com. So if that's true, think of where this sport almost certainly will find itself 15 years from now: The all-time hits leader (Mr. Peter E. Rose) won't be in the Hall of… More »

The liberals are angry, and not without reason. You can imagine a world in which "centrist" Senators used their awesome deal-making powers to forge compromises that incorporate ideas from the left and right alike. A world in which moderate "gangs," in David Brooks' formulation, actually put meat on the bones of Barack Obama's promise to end politics as usual. A world in which Susan Collins, Ben Nelson, Arlen Specter and Joe Lieberman emerged as ardent champions of,… More »

Jim Manzi and Alan Jacobs have already commented on Jerry Coyne's brief for the utter incompability of science and religion, and I basically share their view of the difficulties with Coyne's argument. The core problem, it seems to me, is that Coyne wants to contrast scientific rigor with religious fuzziness and only religious fuzziness; he doesn't want to admit that many realms of human thought and argument are more like theology than chemistry, which is to say… More »

Kaus, on the just-stiffed Anthony Zinni:There aren't many respected foreign policy machers who were right on the Iraq war (no) and on the surge (yes). It's true! So true, in fact, that I'm having trouble coming up with many more names who belong in this small but praiseworthy club. Seems like a question for the hive-mind at Foreign Policy ... More »

Several years ago, in a piece that's long since vanished into The New Republic's world-devouring archives, Jon Chait suggested that liberalism was, by its very nature, more pragmatic and less ideological than conservatism. (As you may remember, this contention was not met with universal agreement from thinkers to his right.) The nub of his argument ran as follows:We're accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives… More »

No musings on the follies of Davos Man, I think, would be complete without a link to this bit of beyond-parody folly. (h/t: Alex Massie) More »

I apologize for throwing up nothing but links today, but I think that between John O'Sullivan, Russell Arben Fox, Yuval Levin, Damon Linker, and Conor Friedersdorf, you can get a pretty good sense of the strengths and weaknesses of Sam Tanenhaus's big "end of conservatism" essay in the latest TNR without my chiming in. More »

Jonathan Last on the sports bubble.Peter Suderman on the difference Liam Neeson makes.Yuval Levin on the meaning of Sarah Palin.Cato Unbound debates the value of partisanship.Five looks at Terence Stamp.Alan Jacobs looks at Auden.And if for some reason you haven't read Mark Bowden on the making of an NFL telecast, do so now, before the memory of (possibly) the best Super Bowl ever starts to fade. More »

I'm probably not going to make it all the way through the Inspector General's illuminating and depressing report on everything that went wrong in Iraq; you probably aren't either. Fortunately, David Frum is doing it for us. More »

This has not been Roman Catholicism's finest month, to put it mildly. The Pope's badly-handled de-excommunication decision is still rippling, and the Vatican has only just now gotten around to issuing the sort of statements that should have accompanied the initial announcement. And yesterday came news that the late Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ and a favorite of John Paul II, may have been even more like a character straight out of a Jack… More »

Via Rod Dreher, here's Federico Fubini on the cluelessness of Davos Man:Publicly, the discourse is all about the dangers of "false market assumptions" and the now-infamous "financial engineering." (I seem to remember it being called "financial innovation" last year.) But offstage, top bankers, private equity bosses, and hedge fund stars keep chitchatting and socializing, just as if banks had not had $1 trillion write-downs, the financial markets had not lost $25… More »

I'm of the opinion that the first season of The O.C. - and only the first season - is the finest teen soap opera ever made. I'm also of the opinion that the thing that made the first season so great was the thing that made subsequent seasons unsuccessful - the decision to take a set of narrative arcs that earlier soaps would have stretched out across multiple seasons, and cram them all into a single year of television. Thus a single subplot on The O.C. could have… More »

On the one hand, the shuttering of Culture11 and the dissolution of Pajamas Media's blogger ad network are the sort of unfortunate events that you'd expect in a downturn: Startups and experimental business models always do badly in economic crunches. But given how badly things are going for the media's established business model, and the work that it sustains - and here I recommend Conor Friedersdorf, late of Culture11, on what the collapse of local newsgathering… More »

On the one hand, the shuttering of Culture11 and the dissolution of Pajamas Media's blogger ad network are the sort of unfortunate events that you'd expect in a downturn: Startups and experimental business models always do badly in economic crunches. But given how badly things are going for the media's established business model, and the work that it sustains - and here I recommend Conor Friedersdorf, late of Culture11, on what the collapse of local newsgathering… More »

There's been a lot of interesting conversation inspired by Damon Linker's long post on ending the culture war, and specifically his suggestion that overturning Roe would lead, eventually, to greater political peace on the abortion issue. Here's Damon's take on the psychology of the pro-life movement: Some Americans believe that an abortion is an act of lethal violence against an innocent human being whose rights (like everyone else's) should be protected by the… More »

Freddie DeBoer, disagreeing with my take on Yglesias's "what's wrong with filling the stimulus bill with non-stimulative liberal goodies?" argument:To me, the central point of Matt's post isn't that deficits don't matter in a time of financial crisis and liquidity traps; the point is that, when Republicans aren't going to play ball no matter what, why not cram a bill full of things Democrats want? By refusing to vote for the stimulus package en masse, the… More »

Here's Yglesias, responding to the complaints from conservatives (and some Democrats) that the stimulus bill is being larded up with spending on possibly-worthy but non-stimulative programs:... a lot of this stuff whether or not it really "belongs in the stimulus" seems irrelevant to me. If you have a program that actually is worthy, then funding it will make the country better, whether or not it truly "belongs" in the stimulus. If you have a program that's… More »

Well, sort of. As you might expect, I agree with a lot of Ambinder's caustic remarks about the Minority Leader's recent "whither Republicanism" speech. But McConnell, like all GOP leaders, is in an awfully difficult spot at the moment: He's heading up a party that desperately needs a new direction, but whose most loyal and vocal members want nothing to do with anything that smacks of compromise or centrism. In those circumstances, the thing for Republicans in… More »

The obvious good news is that the movie franchise will continue post-Prince Caspian, with Fox stepping in after Disney backed out. The not-so-obvious good news is this: While it looks like both the film's principle cast and director will be clearing some time on their calendars this summer to shoot the picture, some sacrifices had to be made on the budget front to make the project viable. According to the Los Angeles Times, Disney spent some $215 million producing… More »

From Brad DeLong, part of The Week's impressive new virtual op-ed page:The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope not) five years, but that does not erase the gulf between those of us in the globe's middle and upper classes and all human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution. We have reached the frontier of mass material comfort--where we have enough food that… More »