Society

If one were to compile a list of all the issues in which elite – and, er, libertarian – opinion is most completely out of touch with “ordinary” people’s concerns, there’s a more than decent chance immigration would be at the top of the list. As Garance reports from Iowa, it may also be the last issue with which Republicans can credibly thrash Democrats. People (like me) in Washington are relaxed about immigration – including illegal immigration – but that’s not true in the mid-west, to say nothing of the south or parts of the south-west. Which is why the question of drivers licenses for illegal immigrants is a topic

Appropriately enough – this being Halloween don’t you know- Slate has this week been running a series of dispatches from my own native heath (Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here). Kate Bolick asks, essentially, why are there so many haunted castles and ghostly apparitions in Scotland? Think what you want. I’m not here to convert you. Either you believe in ghosts or you don’t, and if you don’t—well, it’s probably because you haven’t seen one. They say the best believers are those who began as skeptics. Take Bella Beck (not her real name; she asked that I not use it), a suitably matter-of-fact academic at the

So, Fred Thompson is just a conservative good-old-boy from Tennessee whose folksy charm is his biggest selling point. OK, well then you might expect that Fred would be a champion of traditional Tennessee values. Not so! The Los Angeles Times reviews the 88 cases Thompson prosecuted as a US Attorney in Nashville between 1969 and 1972 and discovers that though: There were a few bank robbers and counterfeiters. But more than anything, Thompson took on the state’s moonshiners and a local culture, rooted in Tennessee’s hills and hollows, that celebrated the independent whiskey maker’s battle against the government’s revenue agents. Twenty-seven of his cases involved moonshining — more than any

Megan on the horrors of travelling in the United States these days: You know, I never really understood why making the trains run on time was so important for Mussolini, but after last week, I can understand how that became one of fascism’s main selling points. She kids, of course. I’ve always thought, however, that improvements to the reliability of the Italian train service improved after Mussolini came to power were as much due to changes in timetabling as actual efficiency gains. In other words, by officially giving the trains more time to reach their destination they had a better chance of actually getting there on time even if the

This New York Times piece by Eric Asimov has, for British readers, a certain charm. It’s rather like seeing the world through alien eyes. My what strange yet wondrous habits you quaintly old-fashioned humans have: I WAS sitting at a noisy bar on a beautiful fall afternoon, watching the bartender work, and she was indeed working. She pulled down on the tap, then pushed back, pulled down and pushed up, in rhythmic repetition like a farmhand at a well. The ale poured slowly into a mug, at first all foam, then turning translucent before suddenly clarifying into a brilliant suds-topped amber. I touched the faceted glass, cool, but not cold.