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Secretaries of State allow passenger numbers to soar by 38% at business airport, despite objections from locals and climate campaigners
It’s probably been done before, though I don’t know of the book if it has, but one could write a terrific book on Marx and his breakups. The model here would be Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives. Instead of a book about five Victorian marriages, however, and the mix of intellectual, personal, and political sparks they emitted, this would be a book about Marx’s intellectual and political divorces. And how each was a critical turning point in his thought and life. The criterion for inclusion would be that Marx had a personal relationship with these individuals. No chapters on Hegel or Smith or Aristotle. Otherwise it would be too sprawling and insufficiently personal, more of a standard intellectual history rather than […]
There’s a lot of worship of intelligence in our society. Some of it is justified but much isn’t.
I’m reasonably intelligent: I’m at the level where I’m startled if someone is much smarter than I am; it doesn’t happen often.
But it does happen. There are people who make me feel stupid.
Intelligence is essentially two things: ability to perform mental operations, and speed of operation. A smart enough person can perform operations a less smart person can’t; can more swiftly learn how to do operations available to both, and processes faster.
Intelligence at its highest levels leads to polymaths: people who have mastered multiple subjects. All that speed matters.
Generally speaking, though, a smarter person will just get to the same conclusion a stupider person who knew the same things would get to faster. Think the kid at the front of class putting his hand up first.
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Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. This election year, with the very real possibility of Trump returning to office, we know it’s important to be reminded of these horrors and to head to the polls in November to avoid experiencing new cruelties, collusions, corruption, and crimes.
Scrambling before showtime Politico has two pre-DNC convention stories worth examining. The first by past convention planners provides a back-stage look at the frenetic preparations for a convention that is at once a four-day infomercial for the Democratic nominee for president, and a last-minute scramble to re-write the script for a convention planned around a different candidate. How to make it must-see TV when everyone knows the outcome? It’s “like herding (childless cat ladies’) cats“: That’s why at this convention, you will see at least one “must-cover” speaker each night: President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton on Monday, President Barack Obama on Tuesday, President Bill Clinton and Governor Tim Walz on Wednesday, and Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday. Even with big names, a Democrat supporting a Democrat isn’t newsworthy, but much like a 1970s sitcom, extra-special guests are — especially Republicans supporting Democrats. This is why conventions have tried to highlight unlikely supporters or allies.
All of us must play a part in lowering our nation’s political temperature. So I applaud Project 2025 mastermind Kevin Roberts for postponing publication to rewrite and tone down the violent rhetoric in his forthcoming memoir, Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America (with a foreword by J. D. Vance), I’ve decided to follow his lead by making similar edits to my forthcoming book, ROCKET’S RED GLARE: Embracing the Cleansing Fire of Patriotism That Will Burn Our Modern-Day Sodom to the Ground So That a New America Can Rise from the Ashes.
Because my memoir was sent to reviewers in its original form, then excerpted online (often out of context) to widespread and vociferous backlash, my publisher has asked that I publicly endorse these new revisions to show that I am “on board” and to “indemnify them” in case of what they described as “a 150 percent chance of litigation.”
I approve of all these changes, is something I’m contractually obligated to say here.
In July a report on the UK's largest immigration detention centre found it was "filthy" and "dilapidated" and had drug problems
Cutting ties with the controversial columnist and the magazine's Associate Editor would be bad for business – and it is hard not to conclude that it must agree with him, writes Brian Cathcart
Ironically, the riots during a leadership election give the party a unique opportunity to turn a page and turn their back on Farage-type populism. The signs are they will not take that opportunity
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August 19th, 2024: This comic was inspired by the sea!! Can any of us truly know her? I have been regularly following the scientific literature on the labour market impacts of COVID-19 and as the evidence is becoming richer we are getting a clearer idea of those impacts. The short conclusion is that public health policy makers, under pressure from ill-informed individual and corporate interests, have failed dramatically to protect the public…
Policymakers are often interested in the degree to which changes in prices are driven by shocks to supply or demand. One way to estimate the contributions of these shocks is with a structural vector autoregression identified using sign restrictions on the slopes of demand and supply curves. The appeal of this approach is that it relies on uncontroversial assumptions. However, sign restrictions only identify decompositions up to a set. I characterise the conditions under which these sets are informative, examining both historical decompositions (contributions to outcomes) and forecast error variance decompositions (contributions to variances). I use this framework to estimate the contributions of supply and demand shocks to inflation in the United States. While the sign restrictions yield sharp conclusions about the drivers of inflation in some expenditure categories, they tend to yield uninformative decompositions of aggregate inflation. A 'bottom-up' decomposition of aggregate inflation is less informative than a decomposition that uses the aggregate data directly.
“I have to do it my way.” —Donald Trump Republicans are whining because their leader, the man who has always been a demented imbecile, is acting like a demented imbecile: “He’s rattled and needs to get on message,” one GOP House member told NOTUS. “Life’s too hard for too many; the border was left open; and everyone is paying too much for too little.” Another GOP House member called Trump’s attacks on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp “extremely foolish” and, like many who spoke to NOTUS for this story, urged the former president to stay disciplined and focus on the issues. “If he displayed self-discipline and impulse control, he’d win,” this member said. “The issues favor us. He’s been unable to focus on the issues and is behind. This is his race to lose, and he’s shooting himself in the foot. There’s some Trump fatigue too, and if he’d focus on issues and get off the personality attacks, he’d connect more with voters.” And another GOP congressman was even more clear-eyed. “Let’s be real: He lost in ’20,” this congressman told NOTUS.
Last night’s Logie awards have ended in controversy after the star of TV show Bluey, Bandit, was escorted out of the event after being blamed for an accident on the red carpet that was in fact left by Home and... Read More ›
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