Ezra Klein

You know, I never wanted Bolton — I don’t trust folks with such aggressive facial hair — but I figured he’d be on a short leash, a neutered sop to the neocons. And so watching him bark, growl, and tear through the UN Reform process, killing a document we should have wanted, derailing progress on […]

Faithful readers will recall the merriment and rejoicing that came when we found I was google’s first hit for “what does it mean when I pee and it hurts?” Guess what!? More good news. Yesterday, I got a hit from “What does it mean when I pee blood?” I’m first there too. You could, theoretically, […]

In his Prospect column this week, Matt wrote: The other possibility is that Republicans are so convinced that government is inefficient and full of people who don’t know what they’re doing that it just doesn’t occur to them to do it any other way. In response, Wil Wilkinson said: Naturally, Matt is implying that there […]

Just fyi, about an hour ago, Britney Spears gave birth about 5 blocks away from me. I’m really not sure how to feel about that.

While I’m talking about N+1, this critical analysis of lap dances and strip clubs they published is one of my favorite articles of all time. And I read a lot of articles. It’s well-written, blisteringly intelligent, and almost annoyingly perceptive. What is being sold in the showroom of Sapphire is not a car but … […]

AO Scott, in his otherwise-impressive piece on The Believer and N+1, offers a fairly bizarre attack, or at least characterization, of blogs: At a time when older forms of media are supposedly being swallowed up by newer ones, the impulse to start the kind of magazine Partisan Review was in the late 1930’s or The […]

A suicide bomber detonated himself in a crowd of Shiites today, shredding more 80 people and wounding 150 others. Elsewhere, gunmen dragged 17 people out of their homes in Taji, killing them on their stoops. All this on top a few mortar blasts, some shootings, carjackings ending in gunshot deaths, and all the rest of […]

Dahlia Lithwick on today’s hearings: John Roberts is putting on a clinic. He completely understands that he needs only to sit very quietly, head cocked to signal listening-ness, while senator after senator offers long discursive rambling speeches. Only when he’s perfectly certain that a question has been asked does he offer a reply; usually cogent […]

Nobody really noticed this yesterday, but The Washington Post had an article about a major lobbyist experiencing a Jerry McGuire-style epiphany after Katrina and embarking on a crusade against his profession: Frederick L. Webber, a longtime denizen of Washington’s lobbying corridor, showed up at work one day last week and found on his desk a […]

I’m hearing a lot of concern that Roberts could be lying through his hearings, saying what Senators want to hear to provoke them into confirming him. I wrote about this awhile back (it’s possible), but have slightly revised my opinion. The first point, of course, is yes, he can do exactly that and there’s nothing […]