Slate

Political pundits proclaimed 1996, 1998, and 2000 as the first Internet elections, but there wasn't much to it. True, John McCain and Jesse Ventura used e-mail and the Web to mobilize supporters, but most candidates just propped up Web sites resembling online yard signs and went back to offline campaigning. Bob Dole may have gotten 2 million hits the day after mentioning his Web site during a 1996 debate, but its most interesting feature was an online crossword puzzle (4… more

Last July, a federal appeals court forced Napster to shutter its MP3-swapping service. Copyright-shirking music geeks turned to rival networks like Morpheus, KaZaA, and Grokster, through which tens of millions of bootlegged files now flow daily. Why are these upstarts still running?

They're darn stubborn. The entertainment industry figured that the Napster court order would put the kibosh on future file-sharing schemes. But the new companies relish playing David to the recording industry's Goliath; Steven Griffin, for example, CEO of Morpheus… more

August Dvorak (1894-1975) dedicated his life to destroying the keyboard that you are almost certainly using right now. He hated the design that put the letters "QWERTY" in the upper left, scattered the vowels, and put obscure letters like J and K in prominent locations. He called it "a primitive torture board" and declaimed against humanity for spurning his alternative known as the Dvorak keyboard.

Six weeks ago, worrying about my aching wrists and furious at my own keyboard, I… more

Federal authorities are currently prosecuting Nicodemo Scarfo Jr. -- the 36-year-old son of jailed-for-life Philadelphia godfather Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo -- for running a loan-sharking and gambling operation in New Jersey. According to a New York Times article, an FBI sweep of Junior's computer hard drive revealed that he was breaking federal usury laws by charging annual interest of 152 percent a year for his very illegal loans.

Now, 152 percent is steep by Citibank standards, but it's a sweet… more

Ok, here's the pitch: A remake of Gary Cooper's 1941 Sergeant York. In the new version, York's this Tennessee farmer who refuses to fight in World War I because of his… more

The struggle among Patrick Buchanan, Donald Trump, Jesse Ventura, and Ross Perot's lieutenants for control of the Reform Party only looks like the clash of celebrity egos. Actually, the Reform Party is splitting along the fault line between American progressivism and American populism--rival traditions represented most recently by presidential candidates John Anderson… more

Carl Jung once observed that it is easier to discern the presence of archetypes from the collective subconscious in works of pulp fiction by writers such as H. Rider Haggard than it is in literary masterpieces. If only Jung had put Edgar Rice Burroughs on his depth-psychologist's couch. Burroughs was the George… more

To justify a new increase in military pay, the Pentagon and legislators are citing a 13 percent "pay gap" between the salaries of servicemen and their civilian counterparts. Ignoring for a moment whether a dramatic increase in military pay is needed, the 13 percent figure is bogus. Even though the Congressional Budget Office debunked the statistic in March, several military representatives continue to cite it in… more

Do taxes really drive Americans crazy? Amity Shlaes thinks so. Her new book, The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What To Do About It, argues that America is on the verge of a civic tax revolt. Voters, she writes, "cry out for tax relief," and when tax breaks are given to them they "discover the puny size of the break" and "turn angry."… more

Republicans propose using the federal budget surplus to finance a tax cut. They argue that the tax burden on the average American has grown. A tax cut may be a good or a bad idea for other reasons, but the notion of a growing tax burden rests on two highly misleading statistics.

The first is that "a typical mother and father who both work paid … more