Paul Waldman

You may have heard of the heartbreaking and outrageous case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman who has been convicted of adultery (which she denies) and sentenced to death by stoning. We might want to note, as we rightly condemn this kind of brutality, that the Old Testament mandates death by stoning for a […]

(Flickr/digiom) Not many good things have come out of the two wars we’re still fighting, but one thing you can say is that they have spurred medical advancement. They’ve given more urgency to the development of prosthetic limbs, for instance, and opened new understandings in how to treat pain. And here’s the latest, as Wired […]

Don’t let The Man cramp your texting style! (Flickr/OregonDOT) Let’s say you’re an entrepreneurial lobbyist, looking for a beleaguered industry in need of some help. Someone whose products are being criticized, but who hasn’t fought back. Well, how about this “distracted driving” thing? Shouldn’t there be someone out there arguing that people should be texting […]

The Washington Monthly has an interesting article by James Verini about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its president, Thomas Donohue. You already know that the chamber is a major player in Washington — they spent $120 million on lobbying in 2009 and have pledged to drop $50 million on races this fall, mostly to […]

If like most Americans you’re a longtime watcher of television, you’ve probably noticed a loosening of language standards over the last decade or so. You can now hear a number of words on TV that used to be bleeped out; we won’t go over the list, but you know what they are. They’re a subset […]

Quick, put that woman on television! (Flickr/SashaW) “It’s hot. Back to you, Brian.” That’s all that’s necessary. We don’t need team coverage, with reporters scattered up and down the coast. We don’t need endless B-roll of people mopping their brows. We don’t need a demonstration of whether you really can fry an egg on the […]

One of the many marvels the Internet has brought us is free education. For instance, let’s say you wanted to listen to a lecture about thermonuclear dynamics, or bioethics, or the history of ancient Rome. You could go over to MIT’s Open Courseware site, where you can watch hundreds of lectures for free. Or do […]

Adam has touched on this, but here’s a bit more Nazi analogies: If the Internet has brought us anything, it’s the opportunity to contemplate the nature of Nazi analogies at length. But yesterday’s argument about it is actually instructive. Briefly: Jeffrey Goldberg defends the invasion of Iraq by noting that the Kurds were quite pleased […]