Ross Douthat

Matt's right that Michael Kinsley's review of God Is Not Great offers some profound insights into how the the media-public intellectual complex works. It's also a textbook example of how that complex works. First, Christopher Hitchens writes a polemic that ranges across religion, religious history, philosophy and science. Then, the editors of the New York Times Book Review decide to commission a review from Michael Kinsley, presumably because both Hitchens and… More »

Reihan had some sharp comments on this Pat Buchanan column when it first appeared, and now Eve Fairbanks chimes in. The piece in question, in which Buchanan blames the Virginia Tech shootings on the Korean hordes who have entered the country in the past few decades, is a good example of why it's so lonely over here on the moderate-restrictionist side of the immigration debate - because all the other restrictionists seem determined to take every chance they get to… More »

Eve Tushnet, in a post from a while back, had some thoughts that seem relevant to the "should atheists envy believers" question: More »

Of my suggestion that it's a little convenient for liberals to play the character card in the case of Rudy Giuliani when they tended to dismiss it where Bill Clinton was concerned, Matt writes: But look, here, by the time the extent of Bill Clinton marital issues came to light in 1998, the man had been President of the United States for more than a few years, so it was hardly necessary to go searching around for hints and clues as to whether or not one would… More »

Like Peter Suderman, I wasn't exactly blown away by Radar Magazine's hitjob on Adam Moss's New York Magazine. I don't read New York all that much, but then again it isn't written for me - like so many things in Gotham, it's written for Manhattanites and aspiring Manhattanites (whether they live in Brooklyn, Boston, or Topeka), not for Yankee-hating New Englanders transplanted inside the Beltway. It's dedicated, as Peter says, to exploring the lives and lifestyles… More »

You know, for someone who thinks Lost jumped the shark way back in 2005 and isn't shy about saying so, John Podhoretz is an awfully faithful viewer. More »

It's been brutal watching Rudy try to finesse the issue, and since he's not going to run as pro-choice and anti-Roe, maybe this is as good a strategy as any: After months of conflicting signals on abortion, Rudolph W. Giuliani is planning to offer a forthright affirmation of his support for abortion rights in public forums, television appearances and interviews in the coming days, despite the potential for bad consequences among some conservative voters already… More »

Let me add my voice to the skepticism about what seems to be the consensus position - running from Rudy through Romney, McCain, Obama, and Hillary - that we need a much larger army. I'm open to the possibility, but I'd like to have the whys of it explained a little bit more clearly. I know that the Rumsfeld theory - that America needs a smaller, lighter, more-agile military, rather than a bigger one - is assumed to have been discredited by Iraq, but it's only… More »

Fred Siegel and Michael Goodwin for the prosecution; Reihan for the defense. More »

Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate, makes the case that Rudy Giuliani's mistreatment of his wife and children should be a political issue. "It's not only the religious or the uptight that can be put off by an utter lack of personal morality in a presidential candidate," she writes. (Glad we cleared that up.) She goes on: A past like Giuliani's betrays a level of self-indulgence that, if nothing else, suggests that more fireworks are in store and that the show will be… More »

I agree with John Podhoretz's complaint about this week's Sopranos (beware of spoilers if you click through), but I don't think the implausibility he points out significantly marred what he rightly calls a great episode. I do, however, want to associate myself with Alan Sepinwall's comments this week, which get at something that worries me as well: ... I really do hope something is coming of all this. Since this final season began, I've been warning everyone that… More »

Credit where credit is due - Christopher Hitchens seems willing to argue the question of God's greatness or lack thereof anytime, anywhere. Here's an account of his debate with Al Sharpton, which sounds (as you might expect) like fine entertainment that left something to be desired on the intellectual side of things; here, more promisingly, is the beginning of an extended exchange between Hitchens and Douglas Wilson, hosted by Christianity Today, on the question… More »

On the question of whether hates crimes legislation should be extended to cover gays, Ramesh writes: [Brad Plumer] seems to think that it would be bigoted for conservatives to accept laws against hate crimes while opposing their extension to cover hate crimes motivated by hostility to gays. I don't see why a conservative who thinks hate-crimes laws are a bad idea generally couldn't conclude that they aren't going to be uprooted from the statute books but shouldn't… More »

I wasn't quite as irritated with this Will Saletan column as Megan McArdle; I just thought it was a little obtuse. Against people who claim that tolerance for gays has paved the way for bestiality chic, as embodied by the quasi-documentary Zoo, Saletan argues that the men who love horses are more like frat boys than gay men, more Rush Limbaugh than Tony Kushner. "At the core of [the zoophiles'] mentality is a craving for otherness," he writes. "Zoophilia isn't homo… More »

I'm a cultural conservative. What does that mean? Well, for instance, it means that when I read a Garance Franke-Ruta op-ed arguing that we need to raise the age of consent for appearing in a pornographic film to twenty-one, in order to shrink the talent pool available for amateur smut purveyors like Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis, I think: Age of consent? Why not just throw the creep in jail on an obscenity charge? And when Garance explains that going after the… More »

Why is it good news that one of my favorite shows has announced that it's going off the air? Because it isn't going off the air till 2010, there will be three more (16-episode) seasons and they'll run re-run free, and if there was ever a show whose creators needed an end-date to shoot for, it's Lost. But there's a larger lesson here, and one that I wish some other great TV shows had taken to heart: Imagine how much better The Sopranos would be if David Chase had… More »

I'm late coming to this, but Mark Thoma responded to my earlier comments on Jacob Hacker's thesis about rising income volatility, and then Reihan responded to Thoma here. As Reihan says, I think that Thoma is taking a somewhat narrow view of what counts as the results of the Sexual Revolution. First, he writes that "the most likely explanations for increasing income volatility are quite different from the 'policy from liberals caused more family breakups, which in… More »

So I thought Fred Thompson's chances at the GOP nomination were looking pretty good - right up until I took a look at Fred Thompson. For some reason, I had this idea that he'd been frozen in time around Die Hard 2, but here he is getting interviewed by Sean Hannity last week, and looking, well, a lot older than I expected. It's particularly remarkable when you consider that he's only five years Mitt Romney's senior - though Romney, obviously, has made some kind of… More »

Matt sides with Jon Chait; Ezra sides with Karl Rove. I take Matt's point that the atheist's self-proclaimed envy for the believer's faith is often a form of condescension, along the lines of saying "I wish I could believe in your crazy religion, you gullible fool, but I'm just too smart for that." On the other hand, I think there are circumstances where the condescension fades into the background: It's hard to see, for instance, why an atheist parent trying… More »

Jennifer Roback Morse explains it all: More »