Category Archives: Readings

To Eugene Volokh for this.

To Brad DeLong for this.

New launch: The Gadflyer: The Future State of the Union:

The Gadflyer is a new progressive Internet magazine. As the name implies, The Gadflyer will be provocative, critical, and iconoclastic. It will cover politics and public affairs from a fresh perspective, offering journalism, analysis, and commentary from a new generation of writers. The Gadflyer will bring together the brightest young progressive voices to provide unique and compelling stories that can be found nowhere else.

The Gadflyer will be unabashedly progressive, but not doctrinaire.

Noble ambitions. Fun to read so far. But is it essential?

I post this item with some nervousness, because, kidding aside, I'm not sure I'm totally thrilled with being so highly googleranked for “how to pick up women” (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see the 'stats' in the right column) and this will only make it (much) worse. It seems to me that the Googleranking much more justly belongs to Matthew Yglesias…

But here goes. Today's New York Times contains a somewhat fascinating and repellent first-person article, He Aims! He Shoots! Yes!!, by a guy who wrote a book about a subject clearly near and dear to his own heart—the “seduction industry”, that is guys who are (literally) professional pickup-coaches to other guys.

Researching a book proposed by an editor, I allowed myself to be taken under the wings of the greatest self-proclaimed pickup artists in the world and entered an underground subculture of men dedicated — sometimes to an unhealthy extreme — to figuring out the mystery of the opposite sex.

…

From New York to London to Croatia — places my reporting took me — many of these men meet off line in groups known as lairs to discuss tactics and techniques before going out to bars and clubs to put their theories to practice.

Leaving aside the obvious issues with any exercise of this sort—objectification, strategic behavior, treating people as means rather than ends only head the list, not to mention the one mentioned in the article (“An extraordinary amount of effort seems to be put forth to achieve something so shallow”)—there's also the thinness of the gruel being peddled: Be confident. Don't seem too needy. Be a little unpleasant especially to beautiful people who are used to getting compliments, it gets their attention.

But perhaps these coaches are on to something, the same something that informs the adage, “Nice guys finish last,” and gave the zing to Groucho Marx's best line about not wanting to join any club that would have a person like him as a member. If the coaches are on to something, though, surely it's something that should be resisted, not extended?

Back from hiatus, and just past its anniversary, three posts in a row at Is That Legal that made me go 'yup':

• Eric Muller expresses surprise that the state of California allows peremptory challenges against judges. News to me. And not necessarily a good idea.
• Remarks on the stilletto job the New York Times did on Dr. Steinberg and Dr. Dean in this morning's paper. To which I'd add only that you could make any politician look like a freak if you run one clip over and over again—let's try that on GWB please.
• And Eric, like me, is excited about water on Mars (but what's up with the Rover?)

You read it here first, although my Modest Dinner-Party-Based Proposal For An Iraqi Exit Strategy looks better when the Onion does it as U.S. To Give Every Iraqi $3,544.91, Let Free-Market Capitalism Do The Rest.

Spotted (and taken seriously!) at Displacement of Concepts (a great Blog title IMHO).

A short excerpt doesn’t do it justice. Have a look at I’m not Toto, and this isn’t Kansas, a funny and also thought-provoking entry to an otherwise not-that-interesting Slashdot thread about taboo subjects:

…One of the base rules of the game was “If you’re out of your tent, you’re in character”.

…a couple of wedding party members wandered into the game space….it took less than 2 hours to convince two sane, intelligent, and reasonably successful (possibly mildly inebriated) people that they had been magically transported into another world. All it took was a few score people with absolutely no willingness to admit that any other truth was possible or to act like there was anything wrong with this world.

Read the full original, or see the duplicated version in the extended.

Continue reading →