(Flickr/Tim Patterson) It seems like every time I’ve turned on my radio in the last week, I’ve heard Daniel Pink, author of the new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, explaining how we can all be happy and fulfilled at work. Turns out you need three things: autonomy (making your own decisions […]
Paul Waldman
Paul Waldman is a weekly columnist and senior writer for The American Prospect. He also writes for the Plum Line blog at The Washington Post and The Week and is the author of Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn From Conservative Success.
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The Powerpoint Is the Message.
Back in the 1960s, Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan told the world that “the medium is the message,” by which he meant that content was far less meaningful than the form in which that content was delivered. If you’re reading, McLuhan felt, your brain is operating in a specific way, regardless of whether you’re reading […]
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Insidious Hippie Values, Now in 3-D.
(Twentieth Century Fox) Via Kevin Drum, Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times offers an interesting exploration of conservative enmity toward Avatar. On the surface, the criticism was pretty predictable – after all, the bad guys in the film are military contractors, and the noble Na’vi, instead of worshipping the kind of god who smites […]
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My New Year’s Resolution: More Partisanship.
Well, not really. But one thing the administration must realize by now is that no matter what they do, they’ll get no credit for their efforts to appeal to Republicans, so long as the revanchist right that sits in Congress is uninterested in their entreaties. So why bother anymore? The way history is so quickly […]
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Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings.
Let’s say you’re a State Department official, and you learn that in a country with a strong terrorist presence, there may be a bomb attack on the United States embassy. Do you 1) close the embassy, thereby protecting the lives of the personnel there, or 2) Keep the embassy open, cause you know, to hell […]
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Scareplane!
If you’re wondering why we only fear terrorism at airports, it’s because al-Qaeda is failing.
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Two All Beef Patties, Special Sauce, Ammonia … Ammonia?
(Flickr/Steve Nagata) While you were relaxing between Christmas and New Year’s, the New York Times published this horrifying piece of investigative journalism on a company called Beef Products Inc. Seems the folks at BPI, applying their good old American ingenuity, thought, “Hey, we’ve got all these fatty trimmings so disgusting they’re normally put into pet […]
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Ten Things to Watch in the Health-Care Reform Conference
It’s not just about abortion and the public option. Every decision Congress faces while merging the Senate and House health bills will give it the opportunity to make reform better.
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The Health-Care Ultimatum
Some progressives have called health-care reform without a public option worthless. Here’s why they’re wrong.
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The Exchanges, the Mandate, and the Opt-Out.
I’ll be saying more about this in my column on Tuesday, but as this new uprising among progressives like Howard Dean, Markos Moulitsas, and Keith Olbermann against the health-care bill has emerged, much of the fire has been directed at the individual mandate, the requirement for everyone to be insured. This often takes the form […]
