Ryan Cooper

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Image via Here Tyler Cowen makes a strangely bland and bloodless call for more monetary stimulus: It’s not very glorious or motivational, but here goes: the costs of inflation, within reasonable ranges, are not very high. He goes on to say he is skeptical of all the purported benefits of more monetary stimulus, but is […]

Over at the Times they’ve got a big piece on Almighty Algebra by Andrew Hacker and how it’s crushing our students: A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. […]

It’s old man Cheney, and he’s got some rather surprising advice: Dick Cheney has some advice for Mitt Romney on choosing a running mate: Don’t pick another Sarah Palin. In his first interview since receiving a heart transplant in March, Cheney told ABC News, that John McCain’s decision to pick Palin as his running mate […]

Fresh on the heels of the epic Romneyshambles disaster that was his trip to London, Romney proceeded to Israel, where he decided to break his word and ban the press from a fundraiser in a public hotel: Some of Romney’s Jewish donors are flying here from the United States to attend the Jerusalem fundraiser on […]

Over at Slate they’ve got a classic Slate-ish bit of astronomer-baiting from Daniel Engber arguing against constellations: On an otherwise clear evening, whatever the season, a smog of Bronze Age graffiti sweeps across the glittering dome and stains the heavens with crude shapes and stick figures—the doodles of a primitive mind. Snakes and scorpions, shepherds […]

1. Former Monthly blogger Kevin Drum lost his famous cat Inkblot last night. Send some karmic vibrations his way. 2. Classic Michael Pollan essay on opium. 3. Yet another Koch-funded study on global warming finds that…yep, it’s for real. 4. Kieran Healy trolls the Olympics fans. I wonder how long it took to make that […]

I’ve been catching some snippets here and there, saw some good fencing, table tennis, and normal tennis. What’s your favorite event? Any big surprises so far?

For most of human history racially-based prejudice has been very common. It’s simple, easily understood, and based on deep psychological roots. Generalizing things based on how they look makes a lot of sense most of the time, but taken too far it can lead to monstrous results. Inflation paranoia is like that, on a smaller […]

Probably the first post I ever wrote that got actual attention was this one, figuring out just how badly you could lose the popular vote and still win the presidency. (I made a couple minor mistakes, so for the sake of correctness the actual answer is that up to 78.05% of the population can vote […]