Ryan Cooper

Dylan Matthews had a quintessential Wonkblog post yesterday, conclusively arguing through a series of charts that the newfound wealth of Washington, DC (whose metro area now has seven out of ten of the richest counties in the country) is not about the size of the federal government, nor the growth of contractors, nor our more-educated […]

For the last several years, Mujahideen-e Khalq, a group billing itself as the “democratic opposition” in Iran, has been running a slick and hugely expensive lobbying campaign to get itself removed from the official government list of terrorist organizations. They succeeded in garnering support from an astonishing array of bipartisan elites, including Rudy Giuliani, Howard […]

I was struck today remembering the 2004 election—the first one in which I could vote—and how often Bill Clinton was on the radio, or TV, or print publications. Back in those days, all former presidents had an elder-statesman shtick where you promoted HIV awareness or nuclear treaties or the like. Ford, Carter and Reagan, before […]

Wilson Peak, via [Ryan Cooper here, filling in for Ed off and on today and tomorrow while he deals with some family stuff.] I grew up in Utah and Colorado, and after spending some time on the east coast, the importance of sportsman stuff like hunting and fishing to Westerners has become more obvious in […]

1. Rome, by Greg Woolf. A nice one-volume summary of the latest in Rome scholarship. Not being a historian, I much appreciate these kind of nickel summaries, with lots of “further reading” sections in case something strikes my fancy. Sometimes we don’t have time to read 5-volume histories of a single president. 2. The New […]

One of the big watershed moments of the past few decades of macroeconomics is the Lucas Critique. Noah Smith explains: The Lucas Critique is simple, and it is correct. If you have a model of the economy that works pretty well, and you try to use that model to predict the effects of a new […]

Given that we just released our College Guide issue (probably our most famous product), I would be remiss in not mentioning that Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have a new online education project, MRUniversity. Here’s how Tyler explains it: 1. The product is free (like this blog), and we offer more material in less time. […]

Above you can see the sea ice extent so far (chart via Angry Bear). We’ve already crushed the 2007 record, and still have a week or so to go before hitting the usual minimum time. It’s hard to think of anything to say about this, aside from the usual creeping panic, but I did have […]

Feeling a little more upbeat today. Anything big happen last night?

From a hilarious Andrew Sullivan catch: Above is a screenshot of the 15 new ads the Romney campaign is now airing in the eight core battleground states, each following an almost identical formula that hits Obama on economic issues tailored to each state. Every ad begins with a cut from Romney’s convention speech: “This president […]