What a woman: She used to tend her garden in Connecticut wearing a bikini, without regard to ultraviolet rays and “those loathsome Lyme ticks.” Her husband — who, she said, “covers himself up as if he were going on a safari” — contracted Lyme disease anyway. Rest in peace.

Weekly Iraq update from Krauthammer: Fouad Ajami, just returned from his seventh trip to Iraq, is similarly guardedly optimistic and explains the change this way: Fundamentally, the Sunnis have lost the battle of Baghdad. They initiated it with their indiscriminate terror campaign that they assumed would cow the Shiites, whom they view with contempt as… Continue reading

What’s wrong with paleoconservatism? Ross Douthat: …paleoconservatism tends to display the weaknesses you would expect from an intellectual movement that hasn’t held power, in any meaningful way, in God knows how long – specifically, a tendency to advance ideas without any regard whatsoever to their practicality, to condemn others for making compromises without pausing the… Continue reading

Freeman Dyson, one of my favorite scientists to read, at TCS Daily: I am especially optimistic just now because of a seminal discovery that was made recently by comparing genomes of different species. David Haussler and his colleagues at UC Santa Cruz discovered a small patch of DNA which they call HAR1, short for Human… Continue reading

Bush and the Press. Seems to me Ross is on the money again. Now there’s a difference, it’s true, between the coverage of Iraq and the coverage of Bush himself, and maybe there’s an argument to be made that even where the national press acquitted itself honorably in its treatment of discrete foreign-policy issues, it… Continue reading