Going by Barry Ritholtz’s theory that magazine covers are a contrary indicator, I predict that Time‘s current cover on Jamestown means there won’t be any more major Jamestown commemorations for, say, a century. In case you were wondering, this observation is (1) a dodgy excuse to get in my second post of the day, because [...]

A former soccer teammate of mine had this to say about my posts a couple of weeks back about the constancy of the tax burden over the past half century or so. (The federal tax burden is around 18.5% of GDP, which is about the average for the post-war era, while the combined federal, state [...]

So Australia won the big match Saturday against Sri Lanka, 281 runs to 215. I mention this mainly because it provides another opportunity to share with you the the florid and often incomprehensible brilliance that is cricket journalism. Here’s the especially florid and brilliant Rahul Bhattacharya summing things up at Cricinfo.com: The final day of [...]

I’m generally sympathetic to Chris Anderson’s argument that the Internet should shift the focus of the media business away from the fat head of blockbusters and toward the long tail of niche content. But it sure ain’t happening yet in music sales. From today’s W$J: Thanks largely to aggressive pricing and advertising, big-box chains are [...]

As this blog’s focus increasingly shifts to matters Australian, I figured I should check out the homepage of The Australian to see what’s up down there. There I learned that the cricket World Cup final is tomorrow (well, the people at The Australian think it’s “tonight”; they would, wouldn’t they). I’d totally stopped paying attention [...]

There are a few commenters over at Swampland who, at the slightest provocation, bring up Time‘s Ann Coulter cover story of two years ago as evidence of the perfidy of this here media enterprise. I tend to think that this is nonsense, and that John Cloud did a pretty great job of portraying the staged [...]

I just got around to reading Ezra Klein‘s Health of Nations article in The American Prospect. It’s a wonderfully clear description of how the health care systems of Canada, France, Germany and our own Veterans’ Administration work (Ezra’s verdict: better than the private U.S. system). It’s fine work, marred only by Ezra’s egregious failure to [...]

George Mason University economist and blogger Bryan Caplan has a new book out called The Myth of the Rational Voter. I haven’t actually seen a copy yet, but I have read about it. This news is making myself kick myself even harder than I usually do, because I have a long-delayed book due out a [...]

A commenter on Brad DeLong’s blog has a few questions for me, apropos of the snide opening line of a post I wrote a couple days ago: Economist Brad DeLong, as part of his long-running campaign to persuade the world that journalists are flawed (and many are; unlike academic economists, who are right about everything [...]