Fortunately, the risk of not getting paid is their boss’s, not the dancers’. The company gets paid pursuant to its contract with the government, but the dancers get paid pursuant to their contract with the company. If Trump bones the company, its still on the hook for the dancer’s wages.

At will employment means that your employer can terminate you at will (that is, without cause), not that you can go to work only days when you feel like it without without being terminated. In other words, the only way a Rockette COULDN’T be terminated for declining to do this show would be if there was some…

I think the source of the problem is the same as for weary/wary, intents and purposes/intensive purposes, bated breath/baited breath, faint of heart/feint of heart. People don’t seem to read as much as they used to, so there are a bunch of phrases that people only know from conversation. If you’ve heard but never…

I believe it’s actually spelled “prawn.”

I always thought it looks like she clambered onto his lap, then immediately suffered an incredibly prolonged and violent seizure.

Also Emma and Isabella are two of the top five most popular baby names. If he couldn’t have taken the time to give his imaginary children more original names, what makes us think he’ll spend the energy necessary to raise them? (Also “Mason” is one of the top names for boys. What kind of world are we living in? https…

There’s no way to know whose vomit it was. You can’t dust for vomit.

This has always been a tough position. If one thinks that eye-for-an-eye style retributive sentencing is wrong — that is, that we shouldn’t sentence people who are convicted of crimes to be subjected to violence or sexual assault (e.g., to being shanked or raped) — then it seems problematic to applaud a sentence that …

I’m pretty sure Ford is dead, because I can’t imagine Hopkins would’ve signed on for years and years of television. They got a great year out of him, then wrote him out of the show in the best way possible.

Untrue. I was hosed and begirdled by at one of the best houses in London by a single man.

Disney really pulled off the long con: eighty years of dominant box office success culminating in yoinking two dozen wallets that’ve already been emptied for popcorn.

I’ll concede that there have always been pockets excluded from any human conflict, but if we’re just looking at conflicts that involved a majority of the human population at the time (or, considering the lack of interest in non-Western civilizations, maybe the majority of the Western populations), then I’d offer the…

There’s also the generational remove for non-Jewish Germans. I remember reading something positing that the increasingly robust nationalist right in Germany is in part a result of a generational resentment of being blamed for what feels like long-distant history. Something similar might be said about American whites…

Here’s where the most ghoulish application of the “why not both?” meme would go.

Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that young voters are less informed that previous generations; I’d bet they’re equally ill-informed. Here’s a great book exploring the empirical basis for believing in the ignorance of the American electorate as a whole (or rather, an excerpt; the whole book you’ll have to get from a bookstore…

Wow, people are really angry about the TPP.

I hope, then, against all empirical data, that your anecdotal experience is representative.

If we could be guaranteed an Ataturk, I guess I could understand why it would be appealing to some people.

That’s damning them with faint praise. My response would have been identical if you had said that older people in this country don’t see democracy as essential because they’ve spent their lives watching their government attempt to inflict and force it upon people around the world rather than allowing them to come to…

It’s easy to forget the you everyone you know (and I and everyone I know) are not representative of an enormous swath of the country. This past election was a helpful reminder.