Earlier this year, I saw the new Wes Anderson film Moonrise Kingdom and really liked it.
Now that it has received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay, Focus Pictures has made the entire script available on their website. Check it out – it’s illustrated and colorful and a lot of fun.
It’s also available in PDF here.
30 Essential Texas Restaurants to Visit Before You Die
I’ve eaten at over half of these (including Babes Chicken Dinner House). I was not overly impressed by the list. Most of these restaurants are not very good – they are touristy and over-hyped. They probably were excellent at one time but have jumped the shark and now exist as a caricature of themselves. Some may be excellent, such as, say, The Mansion on Turtle Creek, or Fearing’s but these are so famous you don’t really need an article to tell you that.
Give me an interesting new place over these hoary old chestnuts anyday.
At the heart of the enduring liberal ideal is a truth that is often forgotten in today’s political debates: the relationship between order and liberty does not have to be zero sum. More government can mean less freedom, and more freedom can mean less government—but things don’t always work out that way.
At one level this is obvious; people don’t so much surrender their liberty by forming a government and agreeing to live in an ordered society as they defend it. Life in an anarchy governed only by the law of the jungle is less free than life as a member of a democratic commonwealth. But this non-zero sum relationship holds in other ways. To have the freedom to drive at 65 miles per hour on an interstate highway, I must accept a lot of rules and restrictions. But the end result of all the requirements about driver’s licenses, insurance, registration and traffic laws is that I can go much faster and farther than I could in a state of nature. There is more order and more liberty in a modern industrial democracy than there is in the forest where our ancestors lived.
The secret of Anglo-American civilization has been its ability to combine the two elements of order and liberty at successively higher levels of both. To think constructively about our future we shouldn’t be thinking about a zero sum tradeoff between order and freedom; we should be thinking about how to build the kind of order that extends our liberty in new and important ways.
Bill Chance 