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.