2/28 At the CEE, a profile the intriguing Joseph Schumpeter, he of capitalism’s “creative destruction” fame. And to contrast socialism’s destructive destruction: here’s a datum showing that socialized medicine is deadly.
2/27 The average American now has six weeks more leisure time per year compared to 1965. Virginia Postrel looks at how we got that extra time and what we do with it. And Michael von Blowhard has a link-rich post on the connections between money and happiness.
2/24 Peter Beinart explains why Lawrence Summers ran afoul of the Harvard faculty establishment. (Requires free login at The New Republic. Thanks to Marsha for the link.) And in the Times of London, Gerald Baker weighs in heavily on the Summers affair.
2/23 At Scientific American, an extended review of three new books on Charles Darwin’s significance. (Thanks to Bob for the article.)
2/22 Don Boudreaux has an interesting proposal about voluntary military service. And worth reading again is William Thomas’s argument against proposals to re-introduce a military draft.
2/21 LA Times journalist Tim Rutten connects the cartoon controversy to strategic decisions made in medieval philosophy. Jason Pappas states it forthrightly: truth is our most important weapon in the battle against the Islamists. And about another enemy of reason and free speech: here is a review of Leo Damrosch’s new biography of Rousseau.
2/20 At Philosophy of Biology, Warren Platts asks: Was Aristotle a materialist or a vitalist? And here is James Lennox’s book-length study of Aristotle’s philosophy of biology. Also: the cane toad as an example of evolution in fast forward.
2/18 Forbes has a cool list of 10 things that will change how you live. (Thanks to Roger for the link.)
2/17 Read George Reisman’s new blog. Reisman is very astute, and I have learned much from his excellent book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.
2/16 Use adverbs sparingly, tastefully, and not unnecessarily, avoid repeating yourself and saying the same thing twice—and go easy on the exclamation points! Elmore Leonard has good advice on writing.
2/15 NASA’s top ten images. And here is the world’s longest-burning lightbulb: 105 years and counting.
2/14 Biting the hand that heals us: a report from the Manhattan Institute on the litigation lawyer industry and medical malpractice. (Via the always amusing and/or infuriating Overlawyered.com.)
2/13 Evolution and crystal-ball gazing: Steven Pinker predicts Life in the Fourth Millennium. (Thanks to Bob H. for the article.)
2/11 At ABetterEarth.org: viable explanations and moral approaches to environmental values.
2/10 From Der Spiegel, an interview with the courageous Hirsi Ali. (Thanks to Karen for the link.) Via Peter Cresswell, a cartoon that captures the hypocritical part of the story: 
And Pamela at the Atlas Shrugs blog has a post and some gruesome pictures of the Muslim holiday of ‘Ashoura’.
2/9 David Mayer has a well-condensed history of affirmative action’s decline to affirmative racism.
2/8 Who are this year’s World’s Worst Dictators? (Via Johan Norberg.) It would be good to see a contrasting list of those politicians who have done the most to advance liberty in the past year. Meanwhile, Economist George Reisman explains that Hitler and the National Socialists were, uhhh, socialists. And check out John Ray’s Dissecting Leftism site for more good historical material.
2/7 Roy Poses, M.D., has some sharp questions about a lengthy list of conflicts-of-interest and possible abuses in the University of California system.
2/6 Ibn Warraq defends the Danish cartoonists, Robert Bidinotto has a measured response—contrasting the lesser sin of gratuitous insult with the great evil of threatening and inflicting violence, and at BlogCritics.com David M. Brown argues that our differences with the Islamofascists are fundamentally about culture and not about foreign policy. (Thanks to Bob H. for the Warraq link.) And the always-sharp Mark Steyn puts the key philosophical point this way: “One day, years from now, as archaeologists sift through the ruins of an ancient civilization for clues to its downfall, they’ll marvel at how easy it all was. You don’t need to fly jets into skyscrapers and kill thousands of people. As a matter of fact, that’s a bad strategy, because even the wimpiest state will feel obliged to respond. But if you frame the issue in terms of multicultural ‘sensitivity,’ the wimp state will bend over backward to give you everything you want—including, eventually, the keys to those skyscrapers.” (Thanks to Karen for the link.)
2/5 
Last night I enjoyed very much “Something the Lord Made” (2004), a gripping movie about the pioneers of heart surgery. Alan Rickman and Mos Def star as surgeons Dr. Alfred Blalock and Dr. Vivien Thomas, and Mary Stuart Masterson plays Dr. Helen Taussig. Their first patient was a baby girl named Eileen Saxon, one of the oxygen-starved “blue babies” Dr. Taussig was treating. I was reminded of Sherwin Nuland’s description of the first operation: “Several of the members of the team that assembled in the operating room on the morning of November 29, 1944, have recorded their alarmed impressions on first seeing the wizened nine-and-one-half-pound blue-gray bundle of breathlessness that was gingerly lifted from her crib and placed on the table by Dr. Taussig and her associates. It seemed impossible that grown men could reach into the open chest of such a tiny birdlike creature, isolate her fragile little blood vessels, and sew them into each other.”
2/4 Left-liberals in the 1960s were wrong about many things—Arnold Kling has a list—and many lefties are still stuck in 1968. Patri Friedman has an excellent follow-up question for libertarians: What year are libertarians stuck in? And: Long-range principles or short-range politicking? Daniel Henninger believes political philosophy is again becoming central in American politics. (Thanks to Joe for the link.)
2/3 Makes you wonder if the administrators at Jacksonville State University have heard of a country called the United States of America: Here is the FIRE’s college speech code of the month. And there is yet more harassment of free speech at DePaul University.
2/2 Do humans use only 10 percent of their brains? Is a dog’s mouth cleaner than a human’s? Do men think about sex every seven seconds? Here are the Top Ten Science Myths. And here are the results of a neat experiment: Are smart people better at ignoring details?
2/1 How rich we are: Don Boudreaux meditates on a 1975 Sears Catalog and follows up with a comparison of the cost in labor then and now for selected items.