10/31 So you’ve always wanted to learn witchcraft. Now your tuition may be tax-deductible.
10/29 College football and air travel: Craig Depken on the efficiency of decentralized markets. (Not that I’m envious or anything.) And on the enormous value of free, decentralized trade when compared to centralized tariffs and controls, Johan Norberg cites this striking datum.
10/28 Does the legal system still encourage personal responsibility? Overlawyered’s archive of personal irresponsibility lawsuits.
10/27 Alex Tabarrok on the secret history of the minimum wage: Minimum wages lead to unemployment and, early in the 20th century that was the whole point. Here is Linda Gorman’s clear overview of the unintended consequences of minimum wages.
10/26 Historian Keith Windschuttle has a collection of lectures and essays on postmodernism that are worth browsing.
10/25 Three giants from Renaissance medical history—passion, hard work, and the new scientific method in action: Andreas Vesalius, William Harvey, and Anton Leeuwenhoek.
10/24 Racism is alive and kicking in North America. And here is an analysis of another sickly symptom.
10/22 Are parents competent enough to feed their children breakfast? TOC’s Edward Hudgins on why we should not take yet another step toward the nanny state.
10/21 Kathy Sierra explains why conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass. (Thanks to Joe K. for the link.)
10/20 A dramatic lessening of the number of wars and deaths in war: Johan Norberg summarizes the newly-released Human Security Report. And John Stossel explains why gun control laws don’t work—and may even kill people. (Via InstaPundit.com.)
10/19 And if not truth, character, and real liberalism, then what are colleges teaching? Non-judgmentalism, hiding behind euphemism, and tolerance for mass-murdering dogmatists? Mark Steyn rips into the foreign policy implications of fashionable multiculturalism. (Thanks to Barbara and Karen for the link.)
10/18 Do colleges really believe in truth, character, and liberal education anymore? Norman Levitt offers a simultaneously charming and disturbing portrait of the contemporary American university. Levitt is co-author with Paul Gross of Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. (Via A&L Daily.)
10/17 In Business Week—another great engineering story: How P&G and Ideo developed the CarpetFlick. (Via Dynamist.)
10/15 Law professor David Mayer argues that, just as twenty-two Democratic senators voted irresponsibly against John Roberts, Republican senators would be irresponsible if they were to vote in favor of Harriet Miers.
10/14 At Tech Central Station, Edward J. Renehan Jr. introduces the historians’ War Over the Robber Barons. And Burton Folsom’s fine The Myth of the Robber Barons is a brief survey of the achievements of six great nineteenth-century capitalists, distinguishing “market entrepreneurs” who create value from “political entrepreneurs” who get money by playing Washington games.
10/13 Great idea: TIA Daily has a new Human Achievements blog.
10/12 Multi-sized replacement testicles, alarm clocks that run and hide, exploding trousers, and stressed-out frogs: This year’s Ig-Nobel Prize Winners. And The Onion profiles that one philosophy student who just needs to shut up.
10/11 Very helpful: Don Boudreaux has a brief, clear explanation of the distinction between micro- and macro-economics. And here is CEE’s profile of the great David Ricardo.
10/9 Are your politics
Mussolini or Mandela? (Via
Not PC.) Worth visiting again is the classic World’s Smallest Political Quiz. This sobering site is well worth exploring: R. J. Rummel’s Freedom, Democide, and War. And this study shows that economic freedom correlates strongly with peace.
10/7 One face of the future of textbook publishing: Wikibooks. And here is another face: Google Print.
10/6 In The New York Review of Books, Richard Lewontin reviews two recent books in the wars over evolution.
10/5 How many athletes, Jews, short people, nerds, and Asians should a college admit? Malcolm Gladwell explains and reflects upon elite college admissions processes. (Thanks to Joe K. for the link.) And at the excellent Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Samantha Harris exposes an illegal speech code at Northern Arizona University.
10/4 Phil Sage’s sage tips for modern life. (Via Not PC.) And at The Onion: Can philosophy help you find your true self?
10/3 Virginia Postrel asks: Which country is more liberal—Canada or the USA? And Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute has a directly relevant comparison of prostate cancer death rates in the U.S., Canada, and other countries. (Via Café Hayek.)
10/1 The great Gannibal of St. Petersburg: the Dark Star of the Enlightenment.