Unqualified Offerings

In discussing Philip Larkin’s poem, “This Be the Verse,” John Derbyshire writes
Though heterosexual, he never married, and seems not to have had much liking for women beyond the sexual interest.
My reading of Larkin’s life, based on biography and poems, is that Derbyshire is wrong on this. We didn’t just learn [...]

A story too weird to do more than link. To tease out the symbolism explicitly would be like stomping a puppy to death.
Via Amygdala.

On Drugs. Dale Franks has it. I would advise the relevant county officials and bar association members to assume that a combined federal-state task force is already poking into everything they do, hoping to get their butts on something. The drug war is such a big boat of gravy for the law enforcement bureaucracy that [...]

Matthew Yglesias promises that he will now have one blog replacing the old many blogs. Taking obvious inspiration from the old UO fanboy and non-fanboy feeds he’ll be offering separate sports and non-sports feeds at the new site. He’s pretty good on sports, though, so I wouldn’t skip that, unless you see sports like dogs [...]

The Editors riffs on Gene Healy ripping on Tyler Cowen tripping on Alex Tabarrok. And Peter Beinart, but who cares about Peter Beinart? Ed:
But it is very easy to imagine how, if George Bush the First had decided to press on to Baghdad – as, four years ago, all serious people agreed he should have [...]

Happy 33 and 10 to Mrs. Offering, the best wife a blog ever had.

Alex has an interesting entry on studies of poor South Americans who get titled to land on which they’ve squatted, and what it does and doesn’t mean for their economic progress:
The good news: Poor people with secure title to their land do indeed invest more in improving their homes than poor people without secure title [...]

Andrew Bacevich has a useful if summary article on “The Islamic Way of War” in the latest American Conservative. In synopsis, Bacevich says that after a few decades of futilely trying to play the machine-age big military game, Muslim countries and sub- and transnational movements have given it up as a bad job. Bacevich’s thesis [...]

Kieran Healy on a problematic Post essay on lethality in Iraq. Excerpt:
All of my own caveats apply to using the number I just calculated to assess the seriousness of military death rates in Iraq. As I’ve said before, the acid test is quite straightforward. Would you—can you?—take a commercial flight to Baghdad tomorrow, get a [...]

Provisionally, the second-best exercise decision I ever made was to run less often for shorter stretches. (The first was sucking it up and running much more slowly.) Last week I got in 15 miles in five sets of 3. I also felt some important and useful improvements in my running mechanics.
Fifteen miles isn’t too damn [...]