Paul Waldman

Mark Twain once said something to the effect that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. This is what I’d like to add to the discussion going on among Jon Chait, Julian Sanchez, and Matt Yglesias on the right’s “epistemic closure,” […]

I have a lot of disagreements with conservatives, but there’s one thing I’ll give them credit for: their support of the publishing industry. I give you the top-selling non-fiction books of 2009, from Publisher’s Weekly (h/t Tyler Cowen): 1. Going Rogue: An American Life. Sarah Palin. Harper (2,674,684). 2. Act Like a Lady, Think Like […]

You don’t have to expect every politician to be a serious policy wonk to believe that he or she ought to have a grasp of at least the basics of the key issues they debate. And if they don’t have that grasp at the beginning of a debate, then they ought to by the end […]

People are beginning to notice that Sarah Palin has morphed into something quite new: not so much a political figure as a kind of multimedia brand, one for whom actual politics seems almost ancillary to the generation of greater and greater celebrity. When you look at Brand Palin, she begins to look like the Fox […]

If you love freedom, you’ll eat this. (Flickr/permanently scatterbrained) One of the little-noticed provisions in the recently passed Affordable Care Act mandates that restaurant chains with more than 20 locations will have to post the calories contained in all their offerings. There’s a lot of skepticism about whether this will actually have much of a […]

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, his chronicle of his time spent puttering about in the woods, that the advent of the telegraph was unlikely to make us much better informed: “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the […]

In an interview with Newsweek, John McCain has denied he ever claimed to be a “maverick,” which is pretty remarkable, since this was the idea on which his entire career was constructed. “‘Maverick’ is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one. ‘I never considered myself a maverick,’ […]

Is this man a little too excited about his latest consumer electronics purchase? (Flickr/Josh Liba) In the early 1960s, advertising executives realized it could be incredibly fruitful to sell products not as objects with practical uses but as emblems of identity. That car isn’t a machine that can get you from one place to another […]

Let’s say you’re interviewing someone for a job, and you notice a lack of relevant experience on his resume. When you ask him about it, he says, “This place is too constrained by the old way of doing things. I’ve never done anything like this job — in fact, I haven’t even worked in this […]