Ezra Klein

So I missed out on Dismemberment Plan tickets which, in the greater scheme of things, is either fair, as I’m a newer fan, or totally unfair, as I’ve never seen them play live. Meanwhile, Spearhead sold out at the 930 Club. So here’s the big question: I love three of Spearhead’s five CDs (which doesn’t […]

Thomas Geoghegan, one of my favorite writers, has a characteristically fresh article comparing Thucydides, a favorite war historian of the NeoCons, to Herodotus, who Geoghegan places more firmly in the liberal tradition. One point: We’re the most blinkered because we don’t do what Herodotus did and travel around the world. In the United States, even […]

You should walk more. And look: I spend a lot of time talking through the failures of our health system. But, frankly, I don’t think the primary problem is care related. It’s economic. We pay too much, get too little, have too much job lock, financially ruin families with bad luck, etc. But anyone expecting […]

I have a new column over at The New York Sun on the whole brouhaha over Fox news and the Nevada Democratic Party debate. In it, you’ll find why I think Fox isn’t anti-Democrat, per se, and I’m curious to hear how folks react to the argument. Update: One cool side effect of the Fox […]

Am I the only one who doesn’t obsessively click around while reading New York Times articles? I’m happy to sign up for the awesome pro-clicking campaign, but I haven’t fallen afoul of the new feature. I just hate it because the cool kids do. That said, it’s sort of an odd idea to make each […]

By Ankush This is an interesting little artifact, though not because I agree with it: Writing in The London Review of Books, Mahmood Mamdani argues from the left against a humanitarian intervention in Darfur. In essence, Mamdani leverages the realization that there is very little the US can do about the civil war in Iraq […]

Can someone explain to me who former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson is and why anyone cares that he’s thinking of running for president?

Over at Salon, Lindsay Beyerstein has a probing interview with photojournalist Nina Berman, who took one of the most iconic, searing pictures of the Iraq War. The shot isn’t from Baghdad, though, it’s from Illinois, where Renee Kline and Ty Ziegel were getting married. Ty was an Iraq vet and, well, you should just look […]

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf The result of this poll is a sad truth that I long ago made my peace with — voters care more about a candidate’s character than the candidate’s issue positions, and least of all about experience and other leadership qualities. Character, unfortunately, is something that voters are in a very […]

(Posted by John.) It must be a cold day in hell — I actually agree with Bill Kristol on something: In this week’s Weekly Standard, editor Bill Kristol writes that Bush must pardon Libby immediately. “If the president does intend to pardon Libby, there is no reason to wait,” he writes. I’m a big, big […]