Mark Kleiman

I don’t suppose we’ll never know how many people died – asthmatics, for example – because Volkswagen designed its “clean diesel” vehicles – all 482,000 of them sold in the U.S. since 2009 – to burn dirty except when they were being tested. The story reads like the most paranoid anti-corporate fantasy, until you get […]

Ted Cruz’s statement on Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk now in jail for defying a court order to do her job by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, demonstrates once again that a high IQ and excellent meritocratic credentials are consistent with functional idiocy, and that functional idiocy is no bar to being treated […]

Something like one million people each year in the United States try to kill themselves (with various levels of determination) and about four percent of them succeed. That makes suicide the 10th-leading cause of death: way ahead of homicide, and about on a par with auto accidents. About half of those attempts involve people with […]

I have to respectfully disagree with D.R. Tucker about the Berkshire Eagle’s decision to open its op-ed column to the local Republican party, leading to the publication of this stunning bit of racist rant. There remains a widespread belief – supported by journalistic convention – that the country currently has two mainstream political parties, holding […]

If you, like me, have a twisted sense of humor and limited compassion, it’s rather funny to see all the Republican politicians and conservative pundits decompensating in the face of the rather predictable outcome of King v. Burwell. Not that it’s unreasonable for them to be disappointed that the court didn’t once again make up […]

Three things to like about Ross Douthat’s Sunday column on incarceration: 1.  He starts in the right place: the sheer scale and horror of mass incarceration, especially as practiced in this country. (Douthat is right: by any reasonable definition, SuperMax is torture.) 2. He acknowledges the key fact: there aren’t enough harmless prisoners that releasing […]

The actual work of government depends crucially on career civil servants. There’s no public task more vital than recruiting, retaining, and managing a corps of smart, honest, dedicated people who believe in the jobs they’re doing and have the respect of those around them. And there’s no one less likely to do that task well […]

At today’s meeting of the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice, I learned that the House of Representatives has voted to “zero out” core funding for the National Institute of Justice and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That wouldn’t abolish those agencies; instead, the Office of Justice Programs would be invited to take […]

James Kwak demonstrates that Greg Mankiw is talking through his hat on the trade issue, quoting Mankiw’s own textbook: Trade can make everyone better off. … [T]he gains of the winners exceed the losses of the losers, so the winners could compensate the losers and still be better off. … But will trade make everyone […]

Megan McArdle defends the Graduated Re-Entry proposal against critics who would prefer to replace prison with nothing, or perhaps with a menu of social services and income supports designed to help offenders straighten out their lives. She does so on “second-best” grounds: even if you were a prison abolitionist in principle, you ought to prefer […]