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For the past few months I've been writing about what in my view is a global consensus that favors dense, mixed use and public transit centered development over the old anti-urban, suburban-centric model of the last century. These policies, the consensus goes, can grease the wheels of a global economy that relies increasingly on urban connectivity, personal mobility and access to ideas.  As capital is mobile, so should people be. My problem is that the consensus relies excessively on market pressures to decide where people should live and migrate, and forces cities to deal with the swift vicissitudes of global capital. This city--hopefully temporarily--is on the losing end of what is euphemistically known as a market correction.

There are several good posts and articles recently written that provide a peek inside the conservative establishment and how it operates, whether its fundraising, or talk radio, and who it consists of and what they are thinking . Many do not like the establishment and posture themselves against it but establishments, like the poor, you will always have with you and they are inevitable because when the centers of government, finance, media and entertainment are concentrated in one place instead of many, it thus requires one to live at or near them to be of some use.  When that many people are at the centers of power, then establishments are born. There's no way around this.  The ascendancy of the right from 1981-2008 was bound to create a conservative establishment with all those people descending upon Washington D.C. since the mid-1970s and onward whether it was to staff think tanks, foundations or Administrations.

However, what we're dealing with here is an establishment that has split itself in two.  In the majority is what I like to call Conservative INC.  It has become a money-grubbing scam as the Boston Phoenix article shows and one that is totalitarian in the way it operates and disseminates ideas.

There's a video on YouTube of the world's greatest basketball player getting humiliated at his own basketball camp. He takes the defeat with dignity, explaining that "in your life, in the game, you get dunked on, you get crossed over." The other campers proceed to laugh at him, having been egged on by Damon Wayans.

Bernanke isn't indispensable, any more than Alan Greenspan or Paul Volcker or William McChesney Martin were.  But everyone thought they were indispensable at the time, and that's a dangerous way to think about these guys.  Putting Fed chairmen on a pedestal, as the financial community does routinely, breeds both complacency and insularity.  In the long run, it's bad for business.

Wall Street needs to calm down and learn that being Fed chairman for a few years doesn't make someone superhuman.  The world won't end if Bernanke is replaced by one of the other dozen or so highly qualified candidates available, and Obama should take the chance to demonstrate this when he chooses Bernanke's replacement.

In what may be one of the first publisher-owned web advertising collaboratives, a group of progressive media outlets, including Mother Jones, The Nation, and Air America, is launching the Ad Progress Network, a "one stop buy" for web advertising which is planned to debut early this fall.

The basic idea of an ad network -- smaller web publications teaming up to attract advertisers -- is nothing new. BlogAds, one of the most popular, has been going since 2002. But Ad Progress is trying to "grow the revenue pie for all these independent media types" with a collaboration that will cut out the advertising middleman, Jay Harris told me. Harris is publisher of Mother Jones and co-chair of the coordinating committee for Ad Progress' parent organization, The Media Consortium. He's betting that by joining forces, these sites can achieve the kind of scale they can't on their own -- and thus appeal to advertisers they couldn't reach independently.

One of the persistent themes of urban change is the presence of positive and negative feedback loops. Crime provides an excellent example. An increase in crime stretches police resources, decreasing the odds that any individual crime is solved and thereby increasing the return to crime -- and generating more of it. Which further stretches police resources.

This process touches off other feedback loops. Rising crime reduces property values which reduces property tax revenue. This limits city resources and further strains the police force and the public services which might otherwise keep at risk residents from turning to crime. Declines in public safety and service quality encourage mobile residents to leave, and since richer residents are more mobile that has a strong negative impact on the revenue base, further complicating matters.

Out-migration also reduces property prices which then attracts people who need cheap housing, which will tend to be economically distressed individuals and households. These families then demand more city services while contributing less to public coffers, and so on.

Luckily, he says, there are positive feedback loops too.

While many civil liberties experts are focusing on the recent Supreme Court decision involving the intrusive search of a 13-year-old girl, plaintiffs' lawyers nationwide have been winning huge settlements in class-action suits on behalf of women and men subjected to strip searches by local police departments.

Damages have reached into the millions in some cases. Los Angeles County recently paid $27 million to settle a class-action suit, New York City paid $22 million, and Washington, D.C. had to pay $12 million.

Despite the substantial settlements, most cases have been resolved with out-of-court agreements that limit publicity. As a result, some legal scholars believe that the invasive practice continues, sometimes even in jurisdictions where settlements have been paid.

It happens to everyone: You come across something hilarious online and want to pass it along. But are you hopping on a trend that's past its expiration date? Answering that question isn't as simple as you'd think. Just ask Jonah Berger, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who has been studying how trends rise and fall for almost a decade. In his most recent work, Berger looked at changing fashions in baby names. Examining a century's worth of data, he and his colleagues discovered that the quicker a name came into vogue, the quicker it went out. Because fads are perceived negatively, parents tend to shun names that have seen a sharp increase in popularity. "If it came out of nowhere, it might not persist that long," he says.

For years, critics of the body mass index have griped that it fails to distinguish between lean and fatty mass. (Muscular people are often misclassifed as overweight or obese.) The measure is mum, too, about the distribution of body fat, which makes a big difference when it comes to health risks. And the BMI cutoffs for "underweight," "normal," "overweight," and "obese" have an undeserved air of mathematical authority. So how did we end up with such a lousy statistic?

It's worth recalling that when the Founding Fathers led the American colonists in revolt against British oppression, they weren't rebelling against torture on the rack or being chained in galleys or having to let aristocrats deflower their daughters. They were rebelling against taxes. To them, having to pay duties they hadn't voted for themselves was a tyrannical taking of property--theft--and, in true Lockean fashion, they concluded that since government exists to protect life, liberty, and property, a regime that does the opposite renders itself illegitimate. What would they make, then, of today's New York City, where 1.2 percent of the taxpayers--40,000 households--pay 50 percent of the income taxes, and half the households pay no income tax at all? If the tax code ensures that those who pay the bulk of the taxes are always a minority of those who vote for the legislature that imposes the taxes, isn't that taxation without representation? Isn't it also the tyranny of the majority that the Founders tried to prevent?

On May 21 at 9.45 a.m., Bierling stood on the highest point on Earth, the 8,848 meter peak of Everest, for a quarter of an hour. That made her the first German woman to have climbed Everest from the Nepalese side and returned alive. Fellow Bavarian Hannelore Schmatz had reached the summit 30 years ago but she died of exhaustion on the way down.

When Bierling arrived in Nepal she was surprised at the extent of the commercial tourism on Everest. In the high season in May some 700 people live in base camp at a height of 5,350 meters -- it has hot showers and even a bakery.

Some summiteers are anything but professional. "Many don't know how to put on crampons or even how to hold an ice pick," Bierling says. She was even more astonished to find that she didn't need to use her own ice pick to reach the summit. "Anyone looking for a mountain adventure shouldn't go for Everest," she says. Without the Sherpas and infrastructure -- such as fixed ropes leading right up to the summit -- some 90 percent of climbers wouldn't even reach the top, she believes.

Here's my modest proposal: why not just break up the banks?

Seriously.

All of the big ones: Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup... Too big to fail is too big to exist, right?

It's hard to see why the bits of Goldman Sachs that underwrite bond issues can't operate independently from the bits that account for most of the high-frequency trading on the NYSE and Nasdaq. You have boutique M&A shops and hedge funds that do each of those things without doing the other stuff, and do quite well.

Unlike a terra incognita Lehman-style bankruptcy, there are well-established legal frameworks for doing this: banks routinely spin off, sell and buy bits of each other, without creating counterparty risk and widespread panic. Goldman would simply spin itself off bit by bit and the remaining shell would return its symbolic assets (an $80,000 commode and Hank Paulson's hair, perhaps) to shareholders and shut down.

There are not the ethical or legal problems that you have in a nationalization. Corporations do not have rights as such, and only exist insofar as they are a very efficient way of pooling together financial and human resources and providing products and services to the market.

Q. ...you mentioned Facebook and Twitter, derisively. Some would argue that these outlets allow for more self-expression than ever before.

A. Every new development in culture always comes as a surprise. It's like a dislocation. And it's always that something is lost and something is gained. Obviously Facebook and Twitter are giving people a sense of community and connection that they lack in their lives. What I'm concerned about, especially with Twitter, is that we don't need any more fragmentation of discourse. There's already this telegraphic style in email.

People of my generation were exposed to a different kind of public education. We were asked to express ourselves in long, reasoned form. That's going. If you're looking for new, young, cultural critics, you're not going to find them on Twitter. It's got to come from people reading, looking for things. That's why at Salon I try to go long with my pieces, because editors say that on the web people don't want to read anything long. Oh yeah? I'll show you long!

What Watchmen does -- the reason I think it's so enjoyable and successful -- is fulfill the promise of comic books to be really excellent trash. It's pulp, yeah, but it's really good pulp -- a complete, genuinely intriguing, mostly coherent story with a few obvious, just-ambiguous-enough themes and a handful of well-crafted genre types as characters. There's action and romance and betrayal and historical sweep and the fate of the world and, really, what else do you need? Or expect? We're talking about a comic book.

Of course, most superhero comics have a tough time delivering dialog that isn't cringe-worthy, much less anything like a surprising twist or a memorable character. You'd think the medium would be spilling over with terribly enjoyable trash, stuff that didn't exactly insult your intelligence but also allows for plenty of souped-up, spandexy fantasy. Not so. As with video games, comic books are pretty awesome in theory, but the bulk of them are worthless. And that's what's so great about Watchmen. It's not that it's some transcendent work of culture-transforming genius, it's that it's a perfectly executed piece of cynical middlebrow pop. Not anything more -- but that's all it needs to be.

Strike the Louvre from your Parisian itinerary. Walk swiftly past its pyramidal entrance, tossing a smug wave to the suckers standing in line. A lifetime in the City of Lights would be squandered if you never explored the world's most famous art museum, but a vacationer passing a week or ten days here is better off exploring other museums, or eating a leisurely lunch at a sidewalk café or strolling along the Seine.

"But I've heard of the Louvre," you might protest. "The Mona Lisa is there! How could I tour Paris, perhaps for the only time in my life, and return home without seeing it?"

Indeed, it is expected that you'll visit.

"Has it changed since my honeymoon?" your coworker may ask.

"Is it really as Dan Brown describes?" your hair stylist might inquire.  

Tell them that the Louvre is a labyrinth where mobs crowd famous works three people deep, particularly the Mona Lisa, entombed beneath three feet of bulletproof glass. Lesser known works mostly span artistic periods visitors know nothing about; the line alone stretches longer than it would take to visit two smaller museums.

My favorite Paris collections trace a single artist's career, showing his works in context; its galleries aren't crowded, the mood isn't frenzied and you can leave after an hour, before successive rooms become a chore rather than a pleasure to ponder. Even a visitor intent on a hoard of great paintings is better off at the Musée d'Orsay, whose extensive collection is quite manageable compared to the Louvre; more importantly, most visitors will find its genres more enjoyable.

An analogy is useful: the Louvre is akin to a library of history's best classical music; enough major symphonies, classic concertos and delightful string quartets exist there to occupy a dozen orchestras for decades. But the music people savor today is rock & roll and its descendants.

That's why casual music fans are far more engaged exploring the moment when rock's birth altered the course of Western music than sifting through the many centuries of musical evolution before it. Elvis Presley, The Beatles and other legends of the late 1960s came in a single epoch... sort of like the transformation that swept European painting and sculpture circa 1880: enter Manet, Cezanne, Monet, Picasso, Braque, Van Gogh and others by 1915.

Hence my litmus test: if your idea of a fun concert is a 10 day classical music festival where the best orchestras in the world perform influential but mostly unfamiliar classics, the Louvre is the art museum for you. Those who'd prefer Woodstock, however, should visit the Musee d'Orsay instead.

CHATTANOOGA -- A nurse accused of shooting her ex-husband in the groin inside his chiropractic clinic while their two young daughters waited outside had written in her diary that she needed to create "portals of exit" for demonic spirits, a detective testified Friday.

Tina Loher, 41, a registered nurse from Eidson, had written in a diary obtained by investigators after the July 10 shooting in Signal Mountain that left 38-year-old Terrance "Terry" Loher seriously wounded, Hamilton County Detective Rodger Brown said. She had also been taken to a hospital briefly with a head injury. She has been charged with attempted first-degree murder and two counts of reckless endangerment.

The accused woman stood in court in a jail jumpsuit at her initial appearance hearing. Her ex-husband, who underwent surgery for the gunshot, was seated in a wheelchair about 20 feet away at the hearing. He cried as he asked the judge to deny her bond.

Hamilton County General Sessions Court Judge Ronald Durby increased Tina Loher's $140,000 bond to $600,000.

Records show the Lohers are involved in an ongoing court dispute over the children.

Brown said Tina Loher's' diary contained an entry that included: "Terry is filled with three demonic spirits. One is assigned to me, one to each of my children. The purpose is to destroy us. The only way Terry will stop trying to destroy us is if the spirits exit his body today. I will have to create three portals of exit, that way they can leave."

The bad baby sitter's a teenage girl, often dressed inappropriately, who is an unreliable scatterbrain, more interested in doing her nails or texting than the kids. When she's not glued to the TV, she's gabbing on the phone all night while eating Mom and Dad out of house and home. Or maybe she's sneaking her boyfriend in after the kids are asleep, or batting her eyelashes suggestively at Dad on the drive home. The bad baby sitter can be a threat not only to the children left in her care, but also to the very marriage of the parents she's working for.

But as historian Forman-Brunell's research reveals, the archetype of the bad baby sitter has more to do with adults' fears about the changing nature of girlhood today -- whether today is in 1945 or 1995 -- than it does with the reality of girls caring for younger kids for pay.

When a brain tumor caused professional photographer Alex Dejong to lose his eyesight three years ago, he turned to gadgets to continue making his art.

Carrying around a Nokia N82 cellphone, Dejong used assistive software to translate sounds into visuals in his mind. After stitching together a mental image of his surroundings, he snapped photos with his Canon and Leica digital cameras.

But Dejong's blindness is acute: He can only perceive light and dark. Because Dejong could not see his own photographs, he hired an assistant for editing. Until recently, editing was a part of the creative workflow that he thought he'd lost forever. And then to his surprise, Apple's iPhone 3GS, which launched late June, gave him back the ability to edit photos.

The new iPhone has a feature called VoiceOver, which reads back anything a user places his finger over on the screen: e-mail, web pages, system preferences and so on. Beyond that, photo-editing applications such as CameraBag and Tilt-Shift perform automated editing tasks that blind users like Dejong could not otherwise do on their own.

A few years ago, Michael L. Ganz, who teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health, published an essay titled "Costs of Autism in the United States." Nowhere in the essay does he consider whether autistic people have brought benefits to the human race. Can you imagine a comparable essay titled: "Costs of Native Americans"? Ganz might think that autism is strictly a disease, but he never mentions or rebuts the fact that a great number of autistics reject this view and find it insulting.

They weigh less than 3 pounds, usually, and are perhaps 15 inches long. But they can remember.

The unborn have memories, according to medical researchers who used sound and vibration stimulation, combined with sonography, to reveal that the human fetus displays short-term memory from at least 30 weeks gestation - or about two months before they are born.

"In addition, results indicated that 34-week-old fetuses are able to store information and retrieve it four weeks later," said the research, which was released Wednesday.

Scientists from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Maastricht University Medical Centre and the University Medical Centre St. Radboud, both in the Netherlands, based their findings on a study of 100 healthy pregnant women and their fetuses with the help of some gentle but precise sensory stimulation.

In March of this year, a scientific team in the UK released a report indicating, through the use of some novel experiments, that crabs may well feel pain. The study overturned decades of claims that crustaceans can't feel much at all, and garnered worldwide attention. Now, in this week's edition of New Scientist, a researcher in the UK named Peter Fraser, who uses crabs in his experiments, has fought back, writing that crabs feeling pain is about as likely as crabs being able to enjoy a good opera.

So the debate continues, except that, astonishingly, Mr. Fraser may turn out to be on the wrong side. I wouldn't be surprised if there are chefs out there who play opera for their lobsters to ease their final moments. And I can tell you for certain that there is a small army of animal-rights activists in Europe lobbying for new laws for crabs, lobsters, crayfish, and other invertebrates. The idea is to give these charming underwater bugs the same legal protections against cruelty already afforded to pigs, cows, and other mammals. Which, for starters, would mean not boiling them alive.

LONDON -- Richard Gasquet escaped a lengthy doping ban Wednesday when the International Tennis Federation's tribunal panel ruled that he inadvertently took cocaine by kissing a woman in a nightclub.

The 23-year-old Frenchman, who was cleared to resume playing after completing a 2½-month ban on Wednesday, convinced the independent anti-doping tribunal that he ingested cocaine with the kiss with the woman he had just met.

It gets weirder.

I think it's safe to say that on criminal justice issues, Sotomayor has given a pretty strong indication that she'll be quite a bit more conservative than the justice she's replacing (though that opinion isn't unanimous). Even if that it isn't the case, she at least realizes that projecting that image will only benefit her in the confirmation process.

All of which says quite a bit about the lack of real national debate on criminal justice issues. Given the flaws in the criminal justice system revealed by DNA testing in recent years, it's unfortunate that liberal interest groups have mostly fallen in line, and avoided raising questions about Sotomayor's record on these issues. The Democrats' party leadership and judiciary committee members aren't interested in defending the idea of protecting the rights of the accused so much as showing that their president's nominee (a former prosecutor, we've been repeatedly reminded) will be just as "tough on crime" as any Republican appointee.

Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry. I had to spend three weeks marinated in this humorless, self-pitying rant as part of a survey of modern English fiction. We spent only a week on Ulysses. Why? As the professor said, "this is my favorite book." It appears to be a lot of other people's favorite books as well; it's on Time's list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. Someone needs to save these people from themselves.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Yes, it's historically significant. Yes, you can "study" it until the cows come home. The big intro lit crit class when I was an undergrad read only one primary text before diving into a dozen different literary theoretical approaches thereto, and the one text was Frankenstein. But it's boring! Boring with boring on top! And it has no style! Read Dracula instead - now there's a novel!

The Watchmen, by Alan Moore. I should probably put this in the same category as Kundera, and just say this is a phase some boys have to go through, and leave it at that. And I'll admit, it holds your attention. When the movie came out recently, instead of going to see it, I re-read the graphic novel. And I was certainly able to read through it - it was a breeze. I wasn't bored. But trash isn't generally boring. And that's the problem: this is trash dressed up as something more. And the sensibility behind the book is not actually one that you want anybody taking seriously.

Your own suggestions?

If I had gone to the Cheesecake Factory with the intention of ordering relatively healthfully, it's pretty likely that the miso salmon would have ended up on my plate. A heart-healthy fish with a soy-based glaze? What could be better?

A lot, as it turns out. On first glance, I would have figure the salmon for the lightest entree, followed by the chicken piccata, the carbonara, and the crispy beef. Not so. The salmon weighs in at 1,673 calories -- which is to say, a bit more than 75 percent of the food an adult male should eat in a day. The piccata is a comparably slim 1,385 calories. The crispy beef is 1,528 calories. And the carbonara? 2,191. The answer might be that someone looking for a healthful meal shouldn't go to the Cheesecake Factory. But insofar as you're already there, or your family wants to go there, making a good decision isn't a particularly straightforward proposition.

This is why the obesity crisis is such a tough issue: Calories are delicious. The Cheesecake Factory isn't doing anything wrong, either ethically or culinarily. Human beings are wired to prefer abundance, salt, fat, sugar, and value. The Cheesecake Factory is giving people the whole package. Changing people's eating habits so that type two diabetes don't become the new chubby would be easy if the food was actually repulsive or the value was bad or it was all, in some other way, a trick. But it's not. The food is enjoyable. The value is incredible. The cost is long-term, and remembering that we might get diabetes down the road is pretty hard when eons of evolutionary wiring are telling us to eat this stuff now now now now it's right here now now!

Okay, question time: Imagine you're a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrivalsomehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country's biggest political scandal of the decade. They've had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.

How do you catch up?

If you're the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack.

Your cost for the operation? One full week from a software developer, a few days' help from others in his department, and £50 to rent temporary servers.

Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it's the scale of the Guardian's project -- 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent -- that's breathtaking. We wanted the details, so I rang up the developer, Simon Willison, for his tips about deadline-driven software, the future of public records requests, and how a well-placed mugshot can make a blacked-out PDF feel like a detective story.

That Q&A is here.

The point isn't that every person who develops a porn habit will turn into Greg Goben or Ted Bundy. That's absurd. But it seems inarguable to me that no good can come of pornography, and whatever weaknesses we struggle with in relation to sexual and emotional health will be amplified by porn. Put another way, can anybody imagine that using pornography makes you a better or more emotionally healthy person?

Does pornography breed rape? Do violent movies breed violent crime? Quite the opposite, it seems.

First, porn. What happens when more people view more of it? The rise of the Internet offers a gigantic natural experiment. Better yet, because Internet usage caught on at different times in different states, it offers 50 natural experiments.

The bottom line on these experiments is, "More Net access, less rape." A 10 percent increase in Net access yields about a 7.3 percent decrease in reported rapes. States that adopted the Internet quickly saw the biggest declines. And, according to Clemson professor Todd Kendall, the effects remain even after you control for all of the obvious confounding variables, such as alcohol consumption, police presence, poverty and unemployment rates, population density, and so forth.

OK, so we can at least tentatively conclude that Net access reduces rape. But that's a far cry from proving that porn access reduces rape. Maybe rape is down because the rapists are all indoors reading Slate or vandalizing Wikipedia. But professor Kendall points out that there is no similar effect of Internet access on homicide. It's hard to see how Wikipedia can deter rape without deterring other violent crimes at the same time. On the other hand, it's easy to imagine how porn might serve as a substitute for rape.

If not Wikipedia, then what? Maybe rape is down because former rapists have found their true loves on Match.com. But professor Kendall points out that the effects are strongest among 15-year-old to 19-year-old perpetrators--the group least likely to use such dating services.

Moreover, professor Kendall argues that those teenagers are precisely the group that (presumably) relies most heavily on the Internet for access to porn. When you're living with your parents, it's a lot easier to close your browser in a hurry than to hide a stash of magazines. So, the auxiliary evidence is all consistent with the hypothesis that Net access reduces rape because Net access makes it easy to find porn.

None of this is meant to argue for or against the morality of pornography. It is meant to suggest that on utilitarian grounds there is a good case to be made that society and some individuals are better off for its presence. On the other hand, if anyone is imagining that this issue isn't fraught, check out Rod's followup post.

Like the United States, France is a melting pot. But while on this side of the Atlantic newcomers came to the United States, on the other it was France that came to the newcomers.

For three-quarters of a millennium, the kings of France pursued a policy of determined and generally successful expansionism, engorging their small principality in the Seine basin into a domain stretching to the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean. Had history taken a slightly different bounce, what is now Burgundy might have been as independent as Belgium.

As slow as the process of expansion was, the process of digestion was even slower. On the eve of the French Revolution, the kingdom was divided by radical differences of law, time zones, tax rules, even by customs barriers. The language of Provence or Languedoc was at least as different from that of Paris as the language of Lisbon was different from that of Madrid. And within the old province, language differed from town to town, from village to village.

The Revolution was a Parisian event imposed on often violently resisting provinces. Nineteenth century French governments - whether royal or republican - ruled the provinces from above like an imperial power, each departement governed by a Paris-appointed prefect accountable to the ministers in the capital, not the population below.

Many of us use those cheap compact umbrellas on rainy days that unfortunately break down quite quickly in fierce winds. A part of sustainable fashion consumption is to repair and mend our belongings when they break down instead of chucking them. Burda Style How-To´s section has a tutorial on what to do when some pieces of your umbrella come unmoored from their spokes. Easy as sewing a button! Found via Considerate Clothing.

We need to find a way to promote the development of new antibiotics. In the meantime, however, we should try not to do things that promote antibiotic resistance. Feeding antibiotics to farm animals not to treat diseases, but just to make them grow faster, is one of those things. There are lots of ways of promoting animals' growth that do not put people's lives at risk. We should find them.

The twenty- to forty-somethings are part of a new fad sweeping Japan: 
"konkatsu" or "marriage-hunting," a word play on "job hunting" that suggests finding Mr or Mrs Right is a matter of good research and thorough planning...

This year Japan has gone konkatsu-crazy, with the trend spawning countless

magazine articles, a weekly TV drama and a best-selling book.

A Tokyo shrine now offers konkatsu prayer services, a Hokkaido baseball team has set up special seats for those looking for mates, and a Tokyo ward office arranges dating excursions to restaurants and aquariums.

A lingerie maker has even come up with a konkatsu bra with a ticking clock
that can be stopped by inserting an engagement ring.

I am finding it difficult to picture that proposal. In any case, the tic tic tic of a telltale heart style bra certainly brings "marriage pressure" to a new level.

Investment literature warns that "past performance is no guarantee of future results." This advice should be attached to anything written about the innovation position of the United States vis-à-vis Asia. All too often, defenders of the status quo dismiss Asia's prospects as an innovation leader because the United States has been the leader for so long--and they assume it will continue to be. But past performance in innovation is no guarantee of future performance, as we have seen with one-time leaders that have lost their advantage, such as Germany and Great Britain. In fact, while the United States once led the world, it no longer does by many measures, and absent significant changes to public policy, it won't in the future. Asia will.

According to Bowker, "275,232 new titles and editions" were published in the United States in 2008. That's far more books than can be reviewed by all publications, blogs, and other forms of media. And so the challenge for book-review outlets is to sort through the mass of unsolicited books that arrives every day, the e-mails from authors and PR reps, and the various other articles and notifications announcing the publication of new and interesting titles. (VQR, I'm told, receives about twenty unsolicited books a week.) Of course, the large publishing houses have an advantage in getting their books into the hands of reviewers and assigning editors, but even they struggle to get their authors the attention they very likely deserve.  With that in mind, what is the best way to connect editors and writers with the books that interest them? And does every book deserve a review?

In Britain, we think it odd that the Americans are prepared to devote acres of print to a seemingly trivial question like whether Christopher Hitchens has shifted an inch to the Right or the Left in his most recent statement on Iraq. This sort of thing means nothing to us, but it remains relevant to Americans who tend to view "Left" and "Right" not as hypostatic theoretical concepts but as measures of the exact position taken by prominent intellectuals on important issues of the day. It is this attitude that allows for the sort of statements that appear on William F. Buckley's Wikipedia entry extolling him as "the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century" or "the first great ecumenical figure of American conservatism."

There are many similarities between baseball and cricket. They are duels of batter (batsman) and pitcher (bowler). They showcase highly individualized, skillful players striving for a collective goal. They are slow, staccato games with plenty of pauses for the audience (and indeed players) to consider what could happen next. Both can move from the seemingly pedestrian to vibrant excitement in less than a second.

They are sports with tremendous history and fabulous rivalries. While there is no love lost between Red Sox Nation and Yankees fans, India and Pakistan almost went to war over cricket (and who knows, they still might). Both sports boast legendary players who elevated the game to new heights. Born at roughly the same time as Babe Ruth, Australian great Don Bradman dominated cricket for nearly 20 years. When Bradman told Ruth that a batter did not have to run on contact in cricket the Babe barked "Just too easy!" Yet Babe Ruth eventually became fascinated by cricket.

Good sports can be enjoyed at many levels. The casual observer enjoys soaking up the atmosphere and beer; the serious fans obsess over the minutiae. Both sports are adored and enriched by lovers and users of data. When Bradman, by then Sir Donald, died in February 2001, the New York Times estimated that were he to have been as far ahead of the crowd in baseball stats as he was at cricket, his lifetime batting average would be an astonishing .392 (in cricket his average was 99.94, the next best is roughly 61).

The differences between the two games are in some respects more interesting.

ROME, Aug. 8 -- Any tourist here knows the sensation: that gnawing feeling that Italians do not pay $3 for a tiny cappuccino or $4 for an unordered basket of bread.

To no one's surprise the suspicion often reflects reality, as restaurateurs will admit in candid moments. It might be an extra 30 cents for an espresso, or a $5 tithe tacked onto a bottle of wine. It may even mean the substitution of lower grade ingredients. But the practice of charging tourists more does exist and is committed daily, even hourly. If executed properly, the turista will be none the wiser.

"You think you are being taken care of," said Christian Boyle, a Londoner who has spent some months in Rome. Soon after arriving, she and some friends displayed fatal naïveté, when they were not sure what to order at a restaurant just off the Piazza del Popolo. "We couldn't decide,'' she said, "so the waiter said he would bring us some things to try.''

"One thing kept arriving after another," she said. Things were fine until "he charged us full price for all these little dishes that we thought we were just trying."

Exploiting a tourist is not surprising anywhere, but some residents say the Romans have their own flair.

"They don't see it as a crime but as a kind of justification," said Tegan Shioler, a Canadian chef and sommelier who has worked in restaurants and hotels around Rome for several years. "It is part of the Italian psyche, and I don't think it is done without humor. Italians are very possessive of their culture, which makes them beautiful. But some Romans disdain visitors, so they humorously justify the fact that to be served is some sort of privilege."

Alcohol levels in a breath sample are converted mathematically to derive a blood-alcohol percentage....The standard formula for converting breath results to blood-alcohol levels is not accurate for everyone, however, and can vary depending on an individual's medical condition, gender, temperature, the atmospheric pressure and the precision of the measuring device, the court said.

"The question is whether a defendant who has a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08% or more measured by breath is entitled to rebut that presumption that he was under the influence" in certain cases, Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote. The court's answer was yes.

I am very much against drunk driving. Among my high school friends in California, it is a point of pride that everyone is quite careful about either abstaining or sleeping on a floor or sofa rather than driving home if they've had too much to drink. I am nevertheless puzzled by Kevin Drum's reaction to this news:

As a legal matter, this might be the right ruling.  I don't know -- but the decision was unanimous, which suggests there was little controversy about it.  As a practical matter, though, it's a pain in the ass.  In the trial I sat on, the defense attorney played up this stuff for all it was worth, essentially trying to convince the jury that breathalyzer tests were so variable as to be completely useless.  And it almost worked.  Most of the jury was initially willing to let our guy walk because they were so confused by all the testimony that they figured there just had to be reasonable doubt.  It basically turned the case into a circus -- and one that, needless to say, can only be played by wealthy defendants who can afford fancy lawyers.

I was disgusted by the whole thing.  If there's a very specific reason to think a particular breath test is wrong -- equipment malfunction, relevant medical condition, etc. -- then I wouldn't mind this kind of testimony.  But just as a general catchall to allow defense attorneys to throw mud on the wall and confuse people?  No thanks.

If a breathalyzer test can be rendered inaccurate by "an individual's medical condition, gender, temperature, the atmospheric pressure and the precision of the measuring device," aren't there always several specific reasons to suspect that the measurement rendered is actually incorrect? It is, rightly, a big deal to be convicted of drunk driving. This would seem to demand that law enforcement use accurate means of assessing guilt.

Two years ago in June, Bridget Kevane, a professor of Latin American and Latino literature at Montana State University, drove her three kids and two of their friends -- two 12-year-old girls, and three younger kids, age 8, 7 and 3 -- to a mall near their home in Bozeman. She put the 12-year-olds in charge, and told them not to leave the younger kids alone. She ordered that the 3-year-old remain in her stroller. She told them to call her on their cell phone if they needed her.

And then she drove home for some rest.

About an hour later, she was summoned back to the mall by the police, who charged her with endangering the welfare of her children.

The issue I want to take up today, however, is not that of tricky choices, or over- or under-involved parenting, questions that have already been discussed with much gusto elsewhere. What really sent my head spinning after reading Kevane's story was the degree to which it drove home the fact that our country's resentment, and even hatred, of well-educated, apparently affluent women is spiraling out of control. The prosecutor pursued her child endangerment case ultra-zealously because she "said she believed professors are incapable of seeing the real world around them because their 'heads are always in a book,'" Kevane writes. "I just think that even individuals with major educations can commit this offense, and they should not be treated differently because they have more money or education," the prosecutor wrote to Kevane's lawyer.

The idea that women with a "major education" think they're better than everyone else, have a great sense of entitlement, feel they deserve special treatment, and are too out of touch with the lives of "normal" women to have a legitimate point of view, is a 21st-century version of the long-held belief that education makes women uppity and leads them to forget their rightful place. It's precisely the kind of thinking that has fueled Sarah Palin's unlikely -- and continued -- ability to pass herself off as the consummately "real" American woman. (And it is what has made it possible for her supporters to discredit other women's criticism of her as elitist cat fighting.) The idea that these women really should "be quiet" comes through loud and clear every time.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ten years ago, with yoga transforming itself into a ubiquitous pop culture phenomenon from a niche pursuit, yoga teachers banded together to create a voluntary online registry of schools meeting new minimum standards for training instructors in the discipline.

But that list -- which now includes nearly 1,000 yoga schools nationwide, many of them tiny -- is being put to a use for which it was never intended. It is the key document in a nationwide crackdown on yoga schools that pits free-spirited yogis against lumbering state governments, which, unlike those they are trying to regulate, are not always known for their flexibility.

Citing laws that govern vocational schools, like those for hairdressers, chiropractors and truck drivers, regulators have begun to require licenses for yoga schools that train instructors, with all the fees, inspections and paperwork that entails. While confrontations have played out differently in different states, threats of shutdowns and fines have, in some cases, been met with accusations of power grabs and religious infringement -- disputes that seem far removed from the meditative world yoga calls to mind.

Last month, I blogged on a series of DNA exonerations of men convicted of rapes in the early 1980s due to the extraordinary claims of Florida police dog handler John Preston, now deceased. Now a fourth conviction has been called into question.

Questions about Preston's miracle dogs have persisted for two decades. See, for example, the jaw-dropping Geraldo Rivera 20/20 segment below. One state's attorney even resigned in protest, stating he wouldn't be a part of his colleagues "manufacturing evidence."

Yet prosecutors continued using Preston.

Half a mile from the county fair And the rain keep pourin' down Me and Billy standin' there With a silver half a crown Hands are full of fishin' rod And the tackle on our backs We just stood there gettin' wet With our backs against the fence

Then the rain let up and the sun came up And we were gettin' dry Almost let a pick-up truck nearly pass us by So we jumped right in and the driver grinned And he dropped us up the road We looked at the swim and we jumped right in Not to mention fishing poles

I found the two wine bottles in the pack, and carried them up the road to where the water of a spring flowed out of an iron pipe. There was a board over the spring and I lifted it and, knocking the corks firmly into the bottles, lowered them down into the water. It was so cold my hand and wrist felt numbed. I put back the slab of wood, and hoped nobody would find the wine...

Bill put the trout in the bag and started for the river, swinging the open bag. He was wet from the waist down and I knew he must have been wading the stream.

I walked up the road and got the two bottles of wine. They were cold. Moisture beaded on the bottles as I walked back to the trees. I spread the lunch on a newspaper, and uncorked one of the bottles and leaned the other against a tree. Bill came up drying his hands, his bag plump with ferns.

"Let's see that bottle," he said. He pulled the cork, and tipped up the bottle and drank. "Whew! That makes my eyes ache."

"Let's try it."

The wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty.

"That's not such filthy wine," Bill said.

"The cold helps it," I said.

On the way back home we sang a song But our throats were getting dry Then we saw the man from across the raod With the sunshine in his eyes Well he lived all alone in his own little home With a great big gallon jar There were bottle too, one for me and you And he said, "Hey! There you are."

It's not that all laws are bad.  We're not base anarchists. It's that lawmaking no longer resides, if it ever did, with the people.  Conversely, the individuals who are responsible, under the Constitution, for passing these laws seem utterly ignorant of the law themselves.  The days when even an attorney could be described as "learned in the law" are long gone.  Today we have attorneys who specialize entirely in such arcane niches as regulatory permitting for power plants, or nursing home standards litigation, or Medicare fraud defense.  And the laws pile up. Perhaps what America needs is an authority whose sole job is to get rid of outdated, ill-conceived, or just plain bad laws.

Heather MacDonald on the NYC renaissance:

The cause of this bust-to-boom revival is largely uncontested: the city's victory over crime. If New York's lawlessness had remained at its early 1990s levels, the city by now would be close to a ghost town. But the cause of the crime rout itself remains hotly contested. Though New York policing underwent a revolution in 1994, vast swaths of the criminology profession continue to deny that that revolution was responsible for the crime drop. They are wrong--and dangerously so. The transformation of New York policing is the overwhelming reason why the city's crime rate went into free fall in 1994. And that transformation, in turn, was aided by an increase in the size of the police department.

This truth means that government budget woes must not be allowed to jeopardize the department's ability to keep crime rates low. The FBI's designation of New York as the safest big city in the country is an economic marketing tool of immeasurable worth. Lose that designation, and Gotham's ability to climb out of the recession and retain and attract businesses and residents will be dealt a severe blow.

She backs up her assertion here.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is the top choice for those Republicans who put national security first and ties Romney for first among voters who list economic issues alone as the priority.

In a perfect world national security conservatives would probably choose Cheney as the 2012 nominee, but he wasn't on the Rasmussen list, and folks shouldn't be terribly surprised that Palin comes out on top in this breakdown.

Replace bubble tea tapioca balls with blueberries.

Why elide the fact that Sarah Palin is a darling of Fox News, the highest rated cable news network in America? Or that she is regularly defended by Mr. Limbaugh, famous television personality Sean Hannity, and Mark Levin, a nationally syndicated radio host whose latest book just ended a run atop the New York Times bestseller list? Or again, surely these savvy Sarah Palin defenders know that the editors of National Review and The Weekly Standard, tenured members of the political establishment, lined up behind her candidacy, and that Gov. Palin herself is a millionaire who enjoyed a six-figure family income before she ever took the statehouse--never mind the lucrative book contract and pricey speaking fees now available to her.

Isn't it actually the case that a good chunk of elite America loves Sarah Palin, or at least is willing to lend rhetorical and financial support to her.

Ross is critical of the idea of meritocracy as the prime organizing principle of society. So am I. I'm interested, though, in how Sarah Palin represented a meaningful response to that idea. Meritocracy, in practice, means the selection of the "best and the brightest" for positions of power and authority, primarily by means of testing and scholastic hoop-jumping. The elite chosen in this manner are Nicholas Lemann's "Mandarins." And there are alternative roads to power and authority in this country. For example, you can work your way up slowly through an organization - Lemann's "Lifers." And there's always nepotism - an important social force in any society, and unfortunately something you can't talk about objectively in America because we're supposed to be against privilege of birth (all the while we strive mightily to ensure just that privilege for our children). And then there are Lemann's "Talents" - people who distinguished themselves by achievement in an entrepreneurial fashion - the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Michael Bloombergs.

Sarah Palin would, presumably, be one of this last group. But what, exactly, is her achievement, beyond her one election to the Alaska governorship? The big problems I have with meritocracy include: that it tells the chosen they are better than other people (in some objective sense), which is an anti-democratic ethos; that it very consciously separates our elite from the people, which isn't healthy for democracy either; that it separates the elite from "real life" in a way that ill-prepares them for the reality that will inevitably smack them in the head one way or other; and that it selects for particular personality types that, while useful in an elite, need to be balanced with other personality types. It is not one of the problems of meritocracy that it tries to select people an elite as such, or tries to select one that will be good at its job. You have to have an elite; you can't have a functioning society without one. That being the case, what exactly is the great counter-meritocratic message that Palin purportedly embodies, and that Ross wants to salvage (presumably for some future candidate) from the wreckage of her brief career on the political stage?

U.S. cities that for years lost residents to the suburbs are holding onto their populations with a mix of people trapped in homes they can't sell and those who prefer urban digs over more distant McMansions, according to Census data released Wednesday.

Growing cities are growing faster and shrinking cities are losing fewer people, reflecting a blend of choice and circumstance.

Lewis McCrary considers the political implications:

If it is to return to electoral success, the Right must craft a message that appeals to more urban and inner suburban voters. Large scale federal "urban renewal" policy has typically produced disastrous results, especially in the federal city itself. Conservatives should speak out against more federal spending as the solution to urban problems, but must also present alternatives.

While making the case that federal bureaucrats aren't to be trusted in shaping urban policy, conservatives must become involved in grassroots city politics. Perhaps new leaders might emerge in the mold of one-time-candidate for Mayor of New York Norman Mailer, who recognized that city authorities have a role to play in solving social problems while simultaneously insisting on neighborhood and community self-determination, free from domination by large-scale bureaucracies and corporate interests.

...there is the fact of President Obama. Whatever policy differences people may have with him, we can all agree that he exemplifies reticence, dispassion and the other traits associated with dignity. The cultural effects of his presidency are not yet clear, but they may surpass his policy impact. He may revitalize the concept of dignity for a new generation and embody a new set of rules for self-mastery.

To be a journalist in Washington is to live one's life surrounded by men who have never driven 110 mph, never spent a night in jail, and never won a fistfight in their lives.

The upper echelons of American journalism have become the exclusive monopoly of former teacher's pets, who as children were never sent to the principal's office, who as teenagers were never suspended for showing up drunk for chemistry class, who as college students never woke up at 6:30 a.m. on the porch of the ATO house, who never played in a rock band or sold a pound of weed or dove from a 50-foot cliff into an abandoned rock quarry.

Washington journalism is like some kind of perverse alternative reality where the Beta males are dominant.