Ezra Klein

About going to the doctor, that is.

As addendum to yesterday’s conversation on obesity, one element of the diets-are-bad position that doesn’t make empirical sense is the similarly counterintuitive, but well-proven, observation that limited starvation is healthy. Compared to a control group, people who ate 25 percent fewer calories than the recommended daily allowance (and people who ate 12.5 percent fewer calories […]

Daivd Leonhardt has a good piece in today’s Times on the death of Fordism — that oh-so-comforting economic philosophy that productive workers should be paid expansive wages and the middle class should drive the country’s economic growth. As he notes, what we’ve seen is a shift towards what I’ll call Hiltonism — that the economy […]

Michael Hiltzik sums things up with admirable clarity: laws can be cynical or short-sighted, and one test of their utility is the range of stakeholders complicit in their violation. In the case of our immigration laws today, the entire nation is winking at the laws, not just the immigrants, and don’t kid yourself. We employ […]

Over in The Wall Street Journal, John Schnapp argues that GM’s once-vaunted “vertical integration” both handicapped the behemoth and ensured that once they were spun-off, as happened to Delphi, they stood no chance of survival: Originally vertical integration seemed like a good idea. GM founder William Crapo Durant thought, reasonably enough, that the more value […]

Via Feministe, this great post of Twisty’s reminded me of something. Everyone’s favorite Spinstar Aunt writes: The mother’s email concludes thusly: “Sometimes I think the whole thing is irretrievably damaged. You know, that big round thing we live on.” Ah, good news at last! The big round thing we live on is going to be […]

I tend to be a bit reflexively hostile to those seeking to normalize obesity. It is not, as some would have it, an immutable condition — I consciously lost 50 pounds when I was in high school and have kept it off since — and all the data I know of shows imposingly high correlations […]

I finally got a free link to my Murray review, so those wishing to read it can head over here.

From Time: “I’m going to announce tomorrow that I’m not running for reelection and that I’m going to leave Congress,” DeLay, who turns 59 on Saturday, said during a 90-minute interview on Monday. “I’m very much at peace with it.” He notified President Bush in the afternoon. DeLay and his wife, Christine, said they had […]

Mannion just wrote one of those posts that many — myself included — have tried to pen, but lacked the talent to definitively articulate. It’s on the psychology of the rightwing fear-mongers, and he gets the causal connection between their conscious projection of inflated terror and their blustering rhetorical bravery just right. Read him.