With the stock market roller-coastering daily, Paulson and Bernanke giving hourly updates on the state of the economy, Suze Orman traveling to every single show on television to try to soothe the panic out of everyday people, the causes and consequences of the bailout keep getting more and more confusing. We can and should blame Wall Street greed. We can can should blame the Republican worship of free market. But we also should be able to look at the the problem from a slightly different angle.
Over at the New Republic, Alvaro Vargas Llosa discusses how it all happened, for him, in "Myth Busters." He writes that University of Texas professor Stan Liebowitz "chronicles the long march toward what we could call the Mortgage State, starting with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 and all the way to the norms that made Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae acquire substantial loans given to people with weak credit."
Again, it's difficult to undestersand exactly what's going on right now, but this gives us one more tool to aid our comprehension.
TV ratings. Heroes isn't doing all that well, apparently. I really want to like that show, but it's just not that good. The guys over at Popnography agree with me.
Sacha Baron Cohen still doing it like Bruno
Glowing jellyfish net Nobel Prize. And Physics Nobel awarded to three particle physicists.
La Daily reports Mr. Black closed. Seized for back taxes. Was that the same reason they closed last time?
Sarah Vowell at the Union Square Barnes & Noble tonight at 7:00.
Travis Barker talks to US Magazine.
Be very grateful that you're gay. If you were straight, you would have to dangle these glowing BrakeNutz from your car. And possibly win a Nobel Prize.
The Blackberry Storm, the newest touchscreen phone, gets a pretty great review.
Fish Living 5 Miles Down Caught On Film
Tennis writer Jon Wertheim's weekly Ad-in/Ad-out
Ryan Kwanten dances in his underwear on HBO's True Blood, created by Alan Ball, the guy who did Six Feet Under. I haven't seen True Blood, but now I sort of have to. I didn't know it was so gay.
Seed Magazine has a great article on how we evolve. Not just how we got to where we are, but where we're going and how we got pointed in that direction at all.
Benjamin Phelan writes:
When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors — Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage — but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing . . .[but] the colossal amount of information suddenly available has spurred a revision of the old static picture that will render it unrecognizable. Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.
Some of the ideas presented have a history of misinterpretation and misapplication, but the reseachers Phelan quotes are meticulous in pointing out the fallacies that might arise from a misunderstandng of the data. One of the more elegant sentences from Phelan, "High intelligence is to great apes as the wing is to birds." I love the transformation of a process into something physical. The full article is available over at Seed.
The Daily Show explains who voters really are.
CNN.com helps keeps the debate facts straight with its Fact Checker.
Gay candidates expected to do well nationally on November 4.
The Swiftboating author of "Obama Nation" arrested in Kenya.
A review of Brokaw's performance last night.
Gwen Ifill says, "Palin blew me off."
Hillary's Advice: "We need some adult supervision!"
This is the Shower Power! Between this and the Dyna-Douche, your shower caddy should be completely set. It even comes with cartoon demonstrations of possible uses. After the jump. Slightly NSFW.
Via Gizmodo
Dlisted always has good stuff. Here's Beyonce's new one. I don't know. Pork and I were doing the math, and it looks something like "Beyonce - tool + vocal talent = Jennifer Hudson." Well, sort of. Jennifer's new album is kinda really bad except for two songs.
From Slate:
The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that it would not hear the case of a 13-year-old Oregon boy whose parents disagree over whether he should be circumcised. The father claims the boy wants to have the operation, but the mother contends that he is merely bending to his father's will. Now a trial judge will attempt to ascertain the boy's wishes. How can the court determine what the boy really wants?
The case is complicated by the teenager's recent conversion to Judaism. I'm betting Andrew Sullivan is going to step in if he needs to.
Now that the weather is changing and my tan has faded, I can't help but think of the nearly perfect summer I spent on Fire Island. The boys, the water, the natural beauty. Friends coming out. Breakups and reunions. The drinking. The sand. The boys. But I'm hardly the first gay man to experience The Pines.
Tom Bianchi captured Fire Island in its gay youth. Over on Out.com, Tom Bianchi shares pictures of what it was like then. "Over the next five summers Bianchi took roughly 6,000 Polaroids of hundreds of gay men -- friends, lovers, and near-strangers -- who were posing, partying, or having group sex in the idyllic disco- and Quaalude-fueled setting of pre-AIDS Fire Island." This was the world that created the myth and then the reality of Fire Island.
This SNL skit was censored. It's not especially funny, and the Barney Frank impersonation could have been a lot funnier. Even with all the brilliance going on with Tina Fey, there have been some missteps. New York Magazine reports that "NBC's lawyers took issue with an onscreen caption that ran under the names of real-life billionaires Herbert and Marion Sandler (portrayed on SNL by Darrell Hammond and Casey Wilson): 'People who should be shot.'"
Not that I expected to learn anything new last night, but I was hoping to learn just a little bit of newness from either McCain or Obama. I didn't. Which, I suppose, is better than learning something bad about Obama from Obama. Or McCain.
I did have a few thoughts, though, during the debate. I was a bit concerned that Obama would use the town hall setting to over-reach in the empathy department. He tends to use black church language and tones when he speaks casually to an audience, and I was afraid that if he did employ that kind of vocal music he would play into the McCain campaign's strategy of portraying him as alien. But, as soon as Obama stood up to speak, he slipped on the professorial robe and used those cadences instead. As he spoke, I couldn't help but envision his early lectures to an admiring audience of college students.
Obama once again sounded, if not Palin-esque, then uncomfortable discussing foreign policy, especially compared to McCain. I was dazzled during the previous debate when McCain rattled off the names of every country and every leader in the entire world in 5.8 seconds. And again last night, McCain's foreign policy segment sounded like he was speaking in his first language, while Obama was speaking in his second.
They went after each other from the beginning. They re-framed Tom Brokaw's questions. They tried to set the record straight. More of the same, really. I'm still not completely sure what McCain meant when he pointed a thumb at Obama and said, "You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one." Was it dehumanizing? Was it racist? It might have been, and given the nastiness that has gone on lately during Palin's speeches, it probably was. I was startled when he first said, "That one." But, thinking about it, his words reminded me a little bit of when Hillary Clinton referred to white voters and got hammered and branded a racist. Comments like McCain's don't lend themselves especially well to another interpretation, but if we're going to accuse someone of being racist we need to be sure that his words cannot be explained another way through context.
I don't think the town hall setting benefited either of them, or, if it did, it benefited them both equally. It was a mild win for Obama. But that's all we need.
Tell Me More Stories (45:52):
Former Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee looked ahead to last night's second presidential debate. The former Republican talks about switching political parties and why he now supports Sen. Barack Obama's bid for the White House.
Host Michel Martin kicks off Rhode Island's Freedom Festival with a conversation on a bicentennial commemoration, marking the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Martin is joined by filmmaker Katrina Browne, Africana Studies professor Dr. James Campbell, Mary-Kim Arnold and the Rev. Jeffery A. Williams, head pastor at the Cathedral of Life.
The ongoing financial crisis is posing some opportunities for parents to teach kids about smart money management. Mocha Moms Jolene Ivey, Cheli English-Figaro and Asra Nomani welcome money coach Alvin Hall, author of Show Me the Money, to discuss teaching youngsters how to become financially sound.
Fresh Air Stories:
A fellow at Oil Change International and at the Institute for Policy Studies, she argues that the oil industry's grip on policy and government has never been stronger. She documents her concerns — and argues for remedies — in a new book.
In Francine Prose's new novel, Goldengrove, a sister's sudden death leaves a young girl adrift. Prose is the author of 15 previous novels, including A Changed Man and Blue Angel, as well as the nonfiction book Reading Like a Writer.
I loved Reading Like A Writer. It contains a lot of what you need to know without becoming pretentious and silly. It's worth checking out.
Plus, Sarah Vowell on America's Puritan Roots on the Larry Lopate Show.(25:43)
You can listen to the podcasts after the jump, or you can click here to open them up in a new window (which is what I do).
Tell Me More (45:52)
Sarah Vowell on America's Puritan Roots on the Larry Lopate Show.(25:43)
The Media Bar is open! You can click below to jump to all of the new stuff, but it's even easier to just belly right up to The Media Bar right there to your left.
Daily Song
Sarah Silverman Gets Out The Vote
Elisabeth With One Foot Out The Door (and Whoopi's Up Her Ass)
Leona Lewis "Forgive Me"
The Trailer for Twilight