Dive into the archives.

• misunderestimating obama

  From tonight’s address to Congress: But we are committed to the goal of a re-tooled, re-imagined auto industry that can compete and win. Millions of jobs depend on it. Scores of communities depend on it. And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it. The first internal combustion engine was [...]

  25 Feb 2009 Economics, History, Politics; no comments. permalink   

• a study of myopia and hysteria

  I like doing things with Helvetica and the Adobe Creative Suite. I also like infographics explaining why many of you are wrong. This is my latest creation.

  23 Nov 2008 Economics, History; 2 comments. permalink   

• the now explosion

  In 1968, broadcaster Bob Whitney experimented with a new program that would play Top 40 singles with a continuous video feed. The result was The Now Explosion, a show a lot like the weekly Top 40 shows of Casey Kasem and Rick Dees. The show recorded in Atlanta and broadcast on WATL-TV. A young Ted [...]

  18 Aug 2008 History, Music; no comments. permalink   

• the costs of NOT dropping the atomic bombs

  From Wikipedia’s entry for Operation Downfall, the plan for the invasion of Japan: Nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the casualties resulting from the invasion of Japan. To the present date, all the American military casualties of the sixty years following the end of World War II — including the Korean [...]

  05 Jul 2008 History, War & Peace; one comment. permalink   

• nope, at long last, he had no decency

  No shortage of recent conservative writers—Ann Coulter, of course, comes to mind—have tried to give Sen. Joe McCarthy partial credit for his hunt for Communists in all corners of public society; it turned out that there were Communists in government, after all. Not so fast, says author Ronald Kessler: The FBI agents who actually chased [...]

  22 Apr 2008 History, Politics; no comments. permalink   

• why The Movement makes me wildly uncomfortable

  Will Wilkinson posts on why one ought to pick anyone but Thomas Jefferson in Radley Balko’s Founding Father poll, and the commenters let loose a flood of verbal diarrhea: FatDrunkAndStupid April 9th, 2008 06:27 11 I’d also take exception to the idea that Jefferson’s position on slavery was worse than Hamilton’s on the Central Bank. [...]

  13 Apr 2008 History, Politics; no comments. permalink