Dylan Matthews

By Dylan Matthews You know when your stimulus package is too cautious? When Marty Feldstein is attacking it from the left: The proposed business tax cuts are also likely to do little to increase business investment and employment. The extended loss “carrybacks” are primarily lump-sum payments to selected companies. The bonus depreciation plan would do […]

By Dylan Matthews Yes, yes, Matt makes some good points about lobbying, but you really can’t write a post about Richard Berman without mentioning that his son David founded the Silver Jews, and just wrote a letter on the band’s message board blasting his father’s line of work. On that note, the Silver Jews sure […]

By Dylan Matthews I’m guessing Danny Boyle really wishes this story hadn’t broken until after Oscar voting ended: Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, two of the child actors in “Slumdog Millionaire,” are still living in the slums of Mumbai, despite the film’s $14 million budget and worldwide success. Ali earned 500 British pounds ($710) for […]

By Dylan Matthews If it weren’t for intrepid New York Times Magazine reporter Daniel Bergner, I never would have known that Queen’s University psychologist Meredith Chivers “favors high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses”. Bergner’s article doesn’t bother mentioning such trivialities as Chivers’ involvement in the infamous Northwestern bisexual erasure study of a few years ago, […]

By Dylan Matthews I see Jeff Goldberg has gotten into the habit of comparing well-respected professors to terrorist leaders. To recap: John Mearsheimer holds an endowed chair at the University of Chicago, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was chosen by his colleagues in the field as the fifth […]

By Dylan Matthews It’s instructive for people my age who are thinking of careers in foreign policy to know that you can back death squads in Central America, deny mass atrocities, brazenly defy Congressional dictates, get convicted of withholding information from Congress, back a covert coup d’état, actively undermine the peace process in Israel, and […]

By Dylan Matthews Responses to Russ Feingold’s proposed constitutional amendment requiring special elections to Senate vacancies are generally unanimous on two points: one, this is a good idea, and two, this will never pass. And they’re both right. But rather than the shoulder-shrug fatalism that Feingold’s proposal has been greeted with, the correct reaction is […]

By Dylan Matthews Reihan Salam claims Animal Collective for Rod Dreher and the Crunchy Cons based on the lyrics to “My Girls”. Fair enough; the last verse (“I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status / I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls”) certainly […]

By Dylan Matthews This may just be an empty campaign promise, but it’s encouraging nonetheless: A Likud-led government would not build new settlements in the West Bank but would allow for natural growth, Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu told Quartet envoy Tony Blair Sunday, in an apparent attempt to calm the international community before this week’s […]

By Dylan Matthews When Congolese rebel General Laurent Nkunda was arrested by his former sponsors in the Rwandan military this past week, it looked like a promising instance of cooperation between Kigali and the Congolese government, which just six years ago were fighting each other in the bloodiest war since World War II. Then again, […]