One of my colleagues from the college newspaper, who introduced me to several bands I still listen to, has a hilarious new memoir exploring his musical and spiritual coming of age in the ’90s and early aughts. Joel Heng Hartse, who’s reviewed music in Paste, Beliefnet and Christianity Today among others, gave a reading Thursday night for Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll at the Christian hipster coffeehouse near our alma mater in Seattle. For anyone who grew up in conservative Christianity...

The party of punishment pushes the Daisy Dems out… until they screw things up again.

Bacon has become ubiquitous. But has it caused us to stumble? Or is it our food salvation?

Waiters are a mainstay in the restaurant culture, and tipping is a social convention. But is it time to eliminate the tip?

I love to set up couples. But if you like it, get ready to put a ring on it.

Are only children ruining society? Or are they the only way to reclaim dominance on the global PTA stage?

Are biracial people too ambiguous to be identifiable? Or are they the greatest thing to happen to the human melting pot?

Writer and self-professed contrarian Christopher Hitchens has esophageal cancer, and as a result has canceled his book tour. I had been eagerly anticipating seeing him at a tour stop in Seattle, but I’m now reflecting on Hitchens’ influence in my own life and writing. Several years ago I founded a campus newspaper with friends, and we dedicated the debut issue to Hitchens. See our tribute back then at the link below.

As Congress gears up for a big vote on health care reform, it’s worth considering how vagrants’ health problems could affect municipal budgets.

In honor of Mitt Romney’s new book debuting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, here’s a tribute to a man who’s not afraid to argue the world is not flat, culturally speaking.

One of my friends from college was shot and killed by a fellow grad who had become obsessed with her. (UPDATE: I learned later I have a personal connection to the suspect – see below.) It is proof that bad things happen to good people. I have trouble thinking of a better person than Jennifer Paulson, and I’ll tell you why.

Every time I meet libertarians, they seem hellbent on making themselves look like horrible human beings. Not for their pro-limited government views, which seem refreshing in a time when The Government Is Taking Over Everything and still retaining the Bush administration’s national-security rationales (best of both worlds!).

The New York Times had a particularly annoying non-news bit of editorializing in their night-of writeup about Scott Brown’s upset victory (in the grand scheme, not the consistent polling). It said the Massachusetts Senate race “has riveted the attention of the nation” because of its implications for health care legislation and the Senate’s balance of power. BS.

How can you oppose lending $50 to a Third World entrepreneur to get a small business off the ground? Well, let me tell you how. Microenterprise is one of the more serious subjects given shallow treatment on my new site, Cultural Imperialist, co-written with Los Angeles screenwriter Jeremiah Lewis. It’s our guide to intelligent discourse on the can-miss topics of the day, like libertarians’ all-consuming need to look cool, merits of the “bed head” look, and relative impressiveness...

President Obama said he invited Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley to the White House for a beer, presumably to have a laugh about this racial and/or class flare-up about wrongful arrest and hissyfittedness in Cambridge. The more important question than whether this will result in some racial breakthrough, for beer connoisseurs at least, is: What Kind of Beer Will They Drink? (UPDATE: Gates has said yes — he’d be willing to have a beer with Crowley as Obama suggested.) It’s...

The Pew Research Center has a very interesting new survey on attitudes toward gun control and abortion after President Barack Obama took office. Within the space of a year, views that were once firmly in the majority for both gun control and broadly-legal abortion are now nearly neck-and-neck – and it’s not just the choir getting preachier: The balance of opinion among independents has changed substantially over the past year. In April 2008, a majority of independents (56%) said it was...

A week after Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean started a national conversation about whether it’s wrong to say something plainly, with no shades of nuance – “I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman,” the verbal version of the Prop 8 vote tally and our president’s personal belief – Prejean’s preamble is still drawing harangues over its accuracy. She said: I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We...

As President Obama’s liberal base gets impatient with his moderate moves, he may be tempted to drop a nuclear policy bomb sure to draw gratitude from activists: actively push Congress to send him the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), as he promised to sign in a widely-shared Planned Parenthood speech. The bill is basically an abortion time-warp, returning the country back to the early days after Roe when states hadn’t yet tried to apply abortion restrictions. FOCA would write Roe into...

The two most tired phrases of 2008 got a makeover at the March for Life in Washington Thursday, where pro-lifers used the new president’s rhetoric to argue for an overhaul of the federal stranglehold on abortion policy for the past 36 years. It surely didn’t compare to the million-plus at the inauguration Tuesday, but the crowd was fairly packed as evidenced by my failed attempts to break through to the north side of the Mall as marchers started for the Supreme Court. The basics seemed...

It’s not a stretch to say that ex-President Bush has carried himself with the utmost dignity in his final two months in office – going beyond what previous outgoing administrations have done for the new guy. From expediting security checks for now-President Obama’s nominees to giving him national security briefings in Chicago, the Bush team gave the new administration everything it needed to hit the ground running. So far, no reports of the letter “H” missing from...

Barack Obama tried to patch things up with the predominant Democratic dynasty today, lunching with Bill Clinton near his Harlem office before going to his joint appearance with John McCain at ground zero. If the food was any guide of Obama’s future as a candidate and president, the mushy middle is where he’s headed. The lunch menu, according to the campaign, was a choice of sandwiches and flatbread pizza from Cosi, plus salad. Beverages were not specified. For those unfamiliar with the...

The latest McCain-Palin ad, on TV and their e-mail list to supporters, implies that FactCheck.org blamed the Obama campaign for “completely false or misleading” rumors about Sarah Palin. Curious to see what this report was, I visited FactCheck, associated with the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and saw they didn’t appreciate the campaign’s creative interpretation of their report: There is no evidence that the Obama campaign is behind any of the wild accusations that we critiqued....

John McCain just found his new attack dog, and I think we’ll all want to get bitten. When McCain first announced Sarah Palin, I thought she was a terrible choice, imagining some grizzled old Alaskan woman who would serve as a poor Hillary substitute. A week later, I’m pretty close to convinced that Palin is a huge asset to McCain, precisely because she is his Obama, just as Joe Biden is Obama’s McCain. The tickets are even, and Democrats are furious that Republicans have someone...

Families of victims of the 9/11 attacks aren’t thrilled with Rudy Giuliani’s heavy emphasis of his service on that fateful day in his campaigning, which will include a trip to Ground Zero. This was news last week but it’s getting renewed attention here in Washington, because the Pentagon 9/11 memorial is coming along and some families visiting the site think he’s crossing the line. Giuliani is politicizing a shared national tragedy, and he should stop immediately, they said...

Tonight was the Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington DC chapter awards ceremony, the “Datelines” (my “Journys” suggestion received no laughs), a well-meaning but overlong paean to a few journalists’ lifetime of service and an exercise in category domination by a hand-and-a-half-ful of D.C. outlets that cared to submit their work. We were our usual selves – long-winded, obliviously chatty while others spoke, and with the exception of the well-paid,...