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But the trouble is that if John Boehner and Mitch McConnell could somehow crush the populists (and they can’t), they would also be crushing the best hope for conservative policy reform. That’s because, for now at least, the same incentives that shape the “bad populism” of the defund movement are also shaping the “good populism” that wants to end farm subsidies or reform drug sentencing or break up banks or cut taxes on families.

Their willingness to engage in theatrical confrontations with President Obama, for instance, is part of what lends figures like Paul and Lee and Vitter the credibility to experiment with ideas from outside the Reagan-era box. And their arm’s-length relationship to Wall Street and K Street makes them both more irresponsible on issues like a government shutdown and more open to new ideas on taxes, financial reform, corporate welfare, etc.

Obviously Republicans should be seeking a way to have the good without the bad: the innovation without the risky brinkmanship, the fresh ideas without the staged confrontations.

But for now, they’re stuck dealing with a populism that resembles Homer Simpson’s description of his beloved beer: It’s both the cause of, and the solution to, all of their problems.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/douthat-good-populism-bad-populism.html?ref=todayspaper

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Before the Internet, my parents were privy to most of my world. They saw whom I interacted with, where I was, what I was doing. Being preadolescent, I spent most of my time with them anyway. I had no desire to befriend four to eight strangers and talk to them daily, for hours, in passive secrecy from my parents.

After the Internet, my parents were privy to much less and would only rarely, and with decreasing frequency, ask about what they no longer knew. “What did you do on the Internet today?” was not a question I remember being asked. If my parents, squinting over my shoulder, saw Esperath Wraithling on the screen, they didn’t see the dark elf wizard I saw, they saw two meaningless words. If they looked at me — whether I was immersed in GemStone III, on a message board, or in a chat room — I appeared to be sitting in a chair, doing almost nothing.

Far from doing almost nothing, I was socializing in and exploring the metaphysical room that had been quietly connected to millions of houses. The shared, boundless room of the Internet seemed normal, even mundane, in the mid-1990s. I didn’t have another childhood for comparison. Only in retrospect — and increasingly, as my memory of a pre-Internet existence became tinier and more conspicuous, like something that glints — does it seem weird and mysterious, almost alien.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/opinion/sunday/when-i-moved-online.html?ref=todayspaper

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“Legend has it that Hemingway won a bet that he could write a story in six words by scribbling on a napkin, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Ms. Mazzie asked her students and fellow faculty members to gin up some of their own “flash fiction,” either about law school or just law. She’s posted a few submissions on the blog.

In the spirit of collegiality, Law Blog jotted down a few about law school.

• For sale: law degree, no promises.

• Three years later, they weren’t ready.

• $200,000, 24 B+’s, first-year associate.

• You’ll get hired. So they claimed.

• ‘But I’m tenured!’ the professor replied.

• The former dean pleaded not guilty.”

– http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/09/20/describing-law-school-in-six-words/?mod=WSJBlog

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How did we get here?

Some pundits insist, even now, that this is somehow Mr. Obama’s fault. Why can’t he sit down with Mr. Boehner the way Ronald Reagan used to sit down with Tip O’Neill? But O’Neill didn’t lead a party whose base demanded that he shut down the government unless Reagan revoked his tax cuts, and O’Neill didn’t face a caucus prepared to depose him as speaker at the first hint of compromise.

No, this story is all about the G.O.P. First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics — Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels! — to promote the same goals.

But now we’re in a third stage, where the elite has lost control of the Frankenstein-like monster it created.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/opinion/krugman-the-crazy-party.html?ref=todayspaper

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So, for instance, when Kanye sampled Otis Redding on Watch the Throne, music critic Chris Richards probably got it right when he said, “although West’s creation sounded cool, the overriding message was, ‘This cost me a lot of money.’”

Thanks to a corporate and legal system that rappers don’t control, that’s one of the underlying messages of just about any sample today. This is a significant break from the early days of hip hop. As Shocklee explains it, “The reason why we sampled in the beginning was that we couldn’t afford to have a guitar player come in and play on our record. We couldn’t afford to have that horn section…or the string sections. We were like scavengers, going through the garbage bin and finding whatever we could from our old dusty records.” In a complete paradigm shift, today it’s probably less expensive to hire those string sections than to sample them.

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– http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/did-the-decline-of-sampling-cause-the-decline-of-political-hip-hop/279791/

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When it comes to sadness and disgust, Rui and co found very little correlation between users. Sadness and disgust do not easily spread through the network in this way. They found a higher correlation among users who tweeted joyful messages.

But the highest correlation by far was among angry users. Rui and co say anger strongly influences the neighbourhood in which it appears, spreading on average by about 3 hops or degrees. “Anger has a surprisingly higher correlation than other emotions,” they say.

That has significant implications. Not least of these is that anger is more likely to spread quickly and broadly across a network.

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– http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519306/most-influential-emotions-on-social-networks-revealed/

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“What’s always amused me about this scene is how absolutely little sense Rocky’s route makes: South Philly becomes North Philly becomes the Italian Market becomes North Philly again, and so on. Obviously, the montage isn’t meant to be taken seriously as an actual workout; it’s just a few scenes strung together so “Gonna Fly Now” can play and Rocky can finish at the top of the Art Museum steps.

But, I wondered, what if this roadwork were treated as one actual run? How far would Rocky go? Well, I decided to find out. I pieced together the routes Rocky could have traveled from scene to scene in this training montage and calculated distance. All distances were mapped out by using the USA Track and Field distance-measuring tool recommended to me by my friend and Philadelphia magazine Managing Editor Annie Monjar. She’s a better runner than I am, so I trust her. However, I’m not sure she could take Rocky in a footrace, at least Rocky II-era Rocky. Let’s see how far he went.”

– http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2013/09/18/rocky-training-run-rocky-ii/?utm_source=iContact&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Philly+Post%3A+Philadelphia&utm_content=Philly+Post+9%2F18+am

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In 2010, the Department of Commerce published a study about what it would take for different types of families to achieve the aspirations of the middle class — which it defined as a house, a car or two in the garage, a vacation now and then, decent health care and enough savings to retire and contribute to the children’s college education.

It concluded that the middle class has become a much more exclusive club. Even two-earner families making almost $81,000 in 2008 — substantially more than the family median of about $60,000 reported by the Census — would have a much tougher time acquiring the attributes of the middle class than in 1990.

The incomes of these types of families actually rose by a fifth between 1990 and 2008, according to the report. They were more educated and worked more hours, on average, and had children at a later age. Still, that was no match for the 56 percent jump in the cost of housing, the 155 percent leap in out-of-pocket spending on health care and the double-digit increase in the cost of college.

So either we define the middle class down a couple of notches or we acknowledge that the middle class isn’t in the middle anymore.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/business/americas-sinking-middle-class.html?ref=todayspaper

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