Yglesias argues against the notion that gays pressed too hard and too fast for marriage by calling upon the judicial rather than the legislative branch to legalize gay marriage:

That aside, granting the backlash hypothetically, I never quite understand what the upshot of this sort of analysis is. Say you’re living your life with your partner and you want to get married. But then the local legal authorities tell you that you can’t get married. That seems like unfair discrimination to you, so you inquire with an attorney. The attorney says, yes, your state has never allowed a man to be legally wed to another man, but he agrees with you that it’s unfair. And not just unfair, illegal, a violation of your state constitution’s guarantees of equal rights. So you sue! Then the case comes before a judge and the judge thinks, yeah, the local authorities’ action is a violation of the state constitution’s guarantee of equal rights. Is the judge supposed to rule against you even though he thinks your case has merits, offering as his reasoning “it would be counterproductive to the long-term political strategy of the gay rights movement for me to offer the ruling I believe to be correct”? That doesn’t sound right.

Via Yglesias (where Matthew has a slightly different take on Linker's review of Religulous than I do -- funny that we both had similar title responses to the original article), Ars Technica takes a serious look at robotic cars, and how they would transform society:

Self-driving cars will never be drunk, tired, or inexperienced. They should make designated drivers as anachronistic as linotype operators, freeing suburbanites from worrying about how they'll get home after an evening of drinking. Similarly, people on long road trips won't need to worry about falling asleep at the wheel. They'll be able to take naps while their cars drive for them. Hundreds of truckers die every year, and the automation of the trucking industry could eliminate the need for human truck drivers, saving hundreds of lives in the process. And far fewer teenagers will have their lives cut tragically short due to crashes caused by their lack of experience behind the wheel.

There is a quick entry over at Yglesias that breaks down the 2000 and 2004 Ohio vote by income and race. This makes me wonder how the vote broke down in the 2008 primaries.

Over at New York Magazine, Matthew Yglesias and Garrett M. Graff talk about the election's generational divide. Graff says, "This election, even more than we realized, is shaping up to be a generational election — will the Millennials take over or the Greatest Generation rule one more time? McCain is really struggling to not come off as a cranky old man, but he has the problem of, well, being a cranky old man — out of touch with the world and the trends of the last decade."