Puking- June 29, 2004 -- Right now, as I write, there is a man in his mid thirties bent over puking on the sidewalk across the street from my window and desk. It's 4:30 in the afternoon. Evidence that gentrification is by no means complete.http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2004/06/puking.html Back from C'ville- June 28, 2004 -- Hi everybody! I'm back from Charlottesville. The Social Change Workshop was I think a big success. Great students. Great faculty. Great week. So many people I want to keep in touch with. And the Mercatus manuscript discussion of John Nye's forthcoming this past weekend was outstanding. Chilled by the pool and played tennis with Brian, Frederic Sautet (who should have a Mercatus bio page by now... cough) and Courtney. It was fun to hear about the Copenhagen Consensus from Doug North. And I...http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2004/06/back-from-cville.html Gmail Sweepstake- June 18, 2004 -- OK. The great gmail giveaway continues. Can't seem to get rid of these things. I've got six accounts to give away. If you want one, you got it. Email me willwilkinson at gmail dot, you know, com. UPDATE: All gone! Thanks for playing.http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2004/06/gmail-sweepstake.html Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students- June 17, 2004 -- You'll have noticed that I've been rather lax with the blog. Well, I've been busy organizing this year's IHS Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students. I'll be driving down to Charlottesville tomorrow to set things up, and then running the Workshop all next week. Check out the list of lectures, and seminar and workshop sessions. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a more intellectually stimulating week anywhere. This is where it's happenin', folks. After that, I'll be sitting in on a.http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2004/06/social-change-workshop-for-graduate.html Alternative History- June 16, 2004 -- Reading about the 10 plane al Qaeda plot, I wonder what would have happened had AQ had their shit together. Imagine if the dome of the US Capitol had been imploded by a jetliner! I think this would have been the single most rousing target. The Capitol represents the American democracy, and hence the American people, far more vividly than, say, the White House (or the Pentagon or the WTC). I shudder to think of the vengeance we might have blindly wrought had the terrorists struck such a main.http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2004/06/alternative-history.html GPI Journalism Fellows- June 11, 2004 -- The Mercatus Center's Global Prosperity Initiative Journalism Fellows are a great bunch. Matt Welch, Mark Hemingway, and Melinda Ammann are some of my favorite people. Somehow, I've never managed to meet Matt, but we emailed back and forth when this blogging thing was starting (his wife said I was cute!), and I can't imagine not actually liking him. Matt's off to Romania with Mercatus's Dragos Aligica (also one of my favorite people!) and some Mason grad students. Mark is headed back to the..http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2004/06/gpi-journalism-fellows.html Reagan and Confirmation Bias- June 7, 2004 -- I am fairly nauseated by the Reagan retrospectives, left and right. It's dispiriting to see that it apparently next-to-impossible for human beings to go beyond their ideological commitments and make a more or less objective assessment of a man's accomplishments. We see all the usual mechanisms of ideological insulation. Any good during Reagan's reign would have happened anyway. Reagan's scandals are justified by his larger visionary struggle against unfreedom. All our ills are directly...http://willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2004/06/reagan-and-confirmation-bias.html |