Month: January 2009

"That’s one thing Harry Potter has done if nothing else. It has restored the reputation of the English boarding school. It has made it something other than a hotbed of homosexuality. Every time a new Harry Potter book comes out, the numbers at English boarding schools go up," – Daniel Radcliffe to Kevin Sessums.

Sobering for the GOP:

House Democrats win by 10.53%: The final popular vote percentages were 53.08%–42.55%, giving Democrats a 10.53% victory. This is the largest popular vote percentage victory for either party in either a Presidential or Congressional election since 1984 (the next largest victory was Bill Clinton with 8.51% in 1996). It is the first double-digit victory for any party in a national election in 24 years.

Kerry Howley talks with Richard Rodriguez about race, homosexuality, and religion. Here Richard explains why he hates the term gay and how the church denies his love.

"I don’t think that there’s going to be a prosecution, quite frankly,” – Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.

"[I]t is one thing to disbelieve in God; it is quite another to never feel a twinge of doubt about one’s own disbelief. And just as the Christian who has never entertained doubts about his faith probably hasn’t thought hard enough about the matter, the atheist who perceives the Christian God and the flying spaghetti monster as equally ridiculous hypotheses really needs to get out more often," – Ross Douthat, discussing teapots.

Arnold Kling mediates a debate between Kevin Murphy and Brad DeLong.

Felix Salmon does an ante-mortem on US News’s new PDF subscription service:

I give this experiment six months to a year before it’s abandoned when the writers for the weekly realise they’re basically shouting into a void, and the publishers realise they’re not making any money off it. It might even last less time than that, if US News print subscribers don’t bother to download the PDF — which is being offered to them for free. This product not only isn’t worth $19.95 a year, it’s not even valuable enough to persuade anybody to subscribe to the print edition of the magazine, or to renew their subscription. It’s doomed, and the only question is when it’s going to die.