I’ve had one brush with British royalty. The Fabulous Wife and I took a trip to Great Britain in May 2014. We spent nearly a week in Edinburgh, Scotland, staying at a hotel on the Royal Mile across the street from St. Giles Cathedral. On a Sunday morning we got…

On August 25 President Biden likened ardent Trumpism to “semi-fascism.” The response has been predictable. The majority of Americans are either unruffled or approving. MAGA Republicans, those ultimate snowflakes who love to dish out disrespect but can’t take it, are outraged. And a few outliers, including me, wonder about how…

Earlier this week I saw a quote from Science Guy Bill Nye in which he called society’s attitude toward climate change “painfully close” to the response portrayed in Don’t Look Up, the Netflix movie about the approach of a devastating comet. It reminded me that I was going to write…

“Aren’t you glad you need an electric car or the bus or your feet?” one of The Fabulous Wife’s cousins in Ohio texted this morning. When The Fabulous Wife asked for clarification, the cousin wrote, “when California outlaws gas in four and a half years.” The cousin got this misinformation…

We’re still far enough from the mid-term elections that campaigns haven’t gone into turbocharge mode. But if you’re a California resident and watch any television at all (my exposure is perhaps half an hour per day), you’ve been pummeled non-stop since April by political commercials featuring Native American tribespeople. …

We’re just three months from the mid-term elections. I haven’t been expecting them to go well for America’s sane majority. The root cause of authoritarianism is fear for the tribe’s way of life and, ultimately, for the tribe’s survival. The authoritarian right’s leaders have played on that fear remorselessly. Remember…

In the wake of the Dobbs decision I’ve been reading up on religiously-based legal challenges to the Supreme Court’s new orthodoxy about when life begins (and thus when the state has a compelling interest in a pregnancy). Most of the stuff I run across is about Jewish and Muslim objections…

Last November I posted a mini-tutorial about the economics of intercollegiate athletics, starting from the startling fact that between 2010 and January 31, 2021, public universities paid at least $533 million to ex-coaches. …

When Ronald Reagan appointed Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court in 1986, Scalia became the first justice to base his jurisprudence on originalism. …