Americans are famously indifferent to history, but history refuses to return the favor. There are legacies from our past that refuse to release their grip no matter how stubbornly determined we are to ignore them. The New York Times posted…
Americans are famously indifferent to history, but history refuses to return the favor. There are legacies from our past that refuse to release their grip no matter how stubbornly determined we are to ignore them. The New York Times posted…
With an audience of black children as a backdrop, Senator Rand Paul continued his effort to brand himself as the “outreach” Republican with a speech at a school in Chicago. His appearance was a maddening blend of everything right and…
California’s open primary system is providing openings for centrists. The New York Times has an article this morning about a Republican challenger to Tea Party favorite Tom McClintock in California’s 4th Congressional District. The challenger, Art Moore, is almost guaranteed…
Easter is the Super Bowl of church, the weekend when people who ordinarily pay no attention to religious matters file into the pews in their Sunday finest before enjoying a nice ham dinner. However, even that tradition of occasional, ritual…
The astro-turf campaign by major tax preparers against the IRS’s plans to offer free online tax filing is descending into parody. For decades both Republicans and Democrats have campaigned around programs aimed to simplify tax compliance. Meanwhile the IRS has…
Technology in our time is moving at a pace so fast it seems that only children have the time to stay current. This dizzying pace of progress is bringing wonder after wonder, so why is economic growth so sluggish? Economic…
Since the sixties, analysts have been using Moore’s Law to summarize the expansion of computing power and, by extension, the growth of information technology as an industry. Named for Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, his “law” can be summarized to state…
It would wise to revisit our assumptions about what computers can and cannot do. Many of us were surprised at the development of computers that could defeat a human at Chess or on the game-show Jeopardy! While those achievements were…
Reading the new book from Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee was like a breath of fresh air. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, elegantly summarizes the radical economic changes I’ve been trying…
The culture wars seem to be grinding toward a close. So what comes next? Are there ways that elements of the old left and right can hash together new alliances to deal with the circumstances we face now? Noah Smith…
GOPLifer 