Elsewhere 
Bottom gun
I can’t name another American icon who has been so popular, and for so long, and yet so hard to like, and for so long. -Stephen Metcalf, writing about Tom Cruise in Slate
Baseball’s parity
As Joe Posnaski points out in a recent Sports Illustrated column, 20 different Major League Baseball clubs have won a World Series title over the past three decades. During the same span: -22 different drivers have won the Indianapolis 500 -20 different golfers have worn The Masters’ green jacket -19 teams have won a D1 […]
Want to lose weight? Park your car.
True story. I’ve lost 28 pounds over the last 12 months, in part because I decided to park my car and seek out alternative modes of transportation. I didn’t exchange my parking pass at work for a bus pass necessarily to lose weight — financial, environmental and reading interests were higher on my list — […]
6,000 kids with machine guns
6,000. That’s the estimated number of child soldiers fighting in Darfur, according to this report in BBC News.
Worst 2008 prediction?
“If [Hillary Clinton] gets a race against John Edwards and Barack Obama, she’s going to be the nominee. Gore is the only threat to her, then. … Barack Obama is not going to beat Hillary Clinton in a single Democratic primary. I’ll predict that right now.” —William Kristol, Fox News Sunday, Dec. 17, 2006. Kristol’s […]
Equilibrium switch
The recession, obviously, is not a good thing. But I think it might be a good thing if when we pull out of it, we switch to a different equilibrium in which people work somewhat less and earn somewhat less. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest it would make people happier, and some good […]
Too weird for ‘The Wire’
The title above and sub-title of this article written by Kevin Carey and published in the Washington Monthly over the summer pretty much says it all: How black Baltimore drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories to confound the Feds. It really is too weird for The Wire, which considering the fake serial killer sub-plot in season five, […]
Post-Katrina madness
Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs — Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that “hundreds of gang members” were marauding through the Superdome. Now it’s clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males. So far, their […]