Assistant Village Idiot

When attending a conference, a good time to take a break is just as the introductory remarks begin.   Nothing of any value is going to be...

My officemate went to a day-long discussion of this sponsored by Dartmouth Medical School.  Apparently they had good arguers on both sides. ...

My brother sent the Fr. Barron video about Bob Dylan in China - which is interesting.  Browsing around in this series, which I had never bef...

A house we lived in 25-35 years ago had a fire over a month ago.  I can glimpse it on my way home from work, and have been keeping tabs what...

For the fifth time, I am teaching a boy to drive.  This time, I am including navigation in the process.  Look up Derryfield School.  Then dr...

I finally got Retriever's blog to work on my sidebar again.  For now. She is back posting after a few months' hiatus.  She has bee...

Pastor preached on this today for Mother's Day, emphasising that this is an impossible ideal and we should rely on grace.  I don't d...

Todd Zywicki over at Volokh's is co-author of a paper about regulation gone wrong . The well-meaning people, wanting to protect the cons...

Trying to hear some Celtics commentary on sports radio, the conversation is still strongly about the Red Sox.  Apparently there is some Beck...

Related to my observation that the positions of liberals and conservatives have changed over time, I ran across this Thomas Pynchon essay fr...

Forgot to mention:  on my trips north to bash around climbing things, I three times passed a bookstore on 115A in Jefferson called Fishnet ,...

Rehashing the label "postliberal," above: I have run with many crowds, including the moderately far left when I was young and mo...

I find that I think about money more these last two years, and the associations I have with it tell me that it has something to do with my n...

Interesting theories show up all the time.  They seem plausible to us, or not, largely because they fit with other ideas we have.  They are...

Because I don't have Captcha for commenting, I do get a little spam every day in my comments.  I can afford to, because with 3600 posts,...

Checking the Celtics' score on ESPN - I am again dipping my toe into following Boston sports - I saw a headline about "slumping Puj...

Bethany King-McGoldrick, of the new blog we have have been pushing (and several of y'all have been visiting) Bad Data, Bad - sidebar - i...

My son in Nome met Hobo Jim at the Iditarod and bought his autographed CD. He sent it on for my birthday as more my sort of thing than his....

A new book by Jim Manzi discusses the lack of evidence that most of our planned interventions have going for them before they are put into p...

Jan raises an entertaining point about climbing mountains – 4000 feet doesn’t sound like much when compared with the peaks of the Rockies. ...