Stephen Burt

Two years after he said he would someday do so, more than two years after the usual brand of Fox "news" coverage began to mislead viewers about Barack Obama, about two months after he turned into the front-runner, and quite a while after he developed the ginned-controversies all front-runners...

So the deceased keep giving political gifts: this may strike you as odd (though legal) in political campaigns, but it seems to me close to normal in the arts, both literally (where estate planning is an important part of philanthropic outreach) and figuratively, since most of the art we're...

I should drop by these parts more often, I know. Right now I want to correct an erroneous story the Huffington Post has circulated lately,

It is, in fact, the Harvard Coop-- a college bookstore operated by Barnes and Noble-- that tried to have students arrested for...

Dear newly-elected Dem majorities, not just in DC but in various statehouses:

Are you looking for a small-scale piece of legislation that will at once boost your popularity, make obviously sound, consumer-driven public policy, hurt nobody except some companies everyone hates, and-- oh yeah-- give Dems a small boost...

I could get used to this feeling. Of winning. Not only the House, but the Senate, since Tester has been declared the winner, and Webb's lead may exceed the Virginia margin of recount. I did not expect us to take the Senate. At all.

For the first time in...

News bits you might otherwise miss.... Mystery Pollster and friends identify a credible suspect for the mega-sleazy push-polls in MD-Sen. and TN-Sen.

Also via the Pollster site, five myths about getting out the vote. Myth one: US voter turnout has long been in decline. (In fact, the percentage...

The DCCC-- that's the committee, run by Rahm Emmanuel, that works to help the Dems win back the House (and to re-elect all Dem incumbents)-- has a weekend special running, it seems: contribute now and the House leadership will match you three-to-one. Assuming they mean your $10 makes them...

I haven't done anything at the Huffington Post in forever, and I miss your feedback: I'm going to experiment by cross-posting these updates both at accommodatingly and in modified form over here.

Taking a cue from Mrs. Coulter, some bullets of recentness, and a couple of links:

+...

1. As John Allen Paulos and others have pointed out, many of us have trouble understanding even simple statistics and other supposedly high-school-level or early-college math.

2. It's famously easy to lie with statistics, especially if your audience has trouble decoding them.

3. The University of Pennsylvania's

In Virginia. In New Jersey. In California. In our fair city. (I also think the right guy won in Minneapolis, a race between two Dems with no national implications: the re-elected incumbent promised good management, and the defeated challenger just promised more police.)

Where else did...

You'll remember from last year's profiles of Rove that one of his trademark moves involves dirty tricks in the last week of a campaign.

Here's a dirty trick in Virginia.

Here's another.

If you live in, or even near, Virginia, consider helping Tim Kaine. He's pulled...

Today's Hackett news: more sleazy ties, albeit at one remove, connecting Republican robo-candidate Jean Schmidt to Ohio Coingate scandal maven Tom Noe.

Hackett needs one last injection of cash to Get Out the Vote tomorrow. Why does he need it? What good will it do? And how...

Breaking news from Ohio: Republican Congressional candidate Jean Schmidt has ties to Tom Noe, the Ohio Republican lobbyist at the very center of the huge, and growing, Coingate scandal. This even though this morning Schmidt said on television (warning: link includes video) that she had never...

I wrote about this one yesterday, but since then the news has just kept pouring in. Chris Bowers over at MyDD has the goods: Dem and Iraq veteran Paul Hackett is making the GOP play all-out defense (and burn through money) in a very red part of...

The most exciting-- and to me, heartening-- political news of the moment isn't in Washington, D.C., New York, or Iraq: it's in Ohio's Second Congressional District, outside Cincinnati along the Ohio River, where Democrat and Iraq war veteran Paul Hackett faces Republican hack Jean Schmidt in...

A few weeks ago I put up a kind of introduction to the WNBA. At the time I promised a later post introducing all thirteen teams, from league-leading Connecticut to locked-in-the-basement Charlotte.

The 34 games season is now halfway done, and last weekend's All-Star Game...

This weekend brings many questions: why did the Vice President enter the hospital? What (if anything) can the U.S. do about Iran? Is thimerosal truly toxic, or not? How much bile can spew from Karl Rove? Can Howard Dean really pursue a fifty-state...

Things we-- and Bruce Wayne-- learn during Batman Begins:

Terrorists want to spread fear and panic: that's the point of terrorism, not a side-effect. Terrorists love it when the fear and panic they cause make the target society do stupid things.

The worst...

In the new NYT Sunday mag, Roger Lowenstein offers a late-Nineties-style paean to risk: he thinks we should take more risks, at least with our money. Some would say we’re already taking unwise ones. There's good evidence that the last two decades have seen a massive...