Linkdump #2.

* Why you're still fat: “The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.” The only real success I've had with weight loss has come through obsessive calorie counting through fitday.com. Nothing else makes a dent.

* Oh, Cleveland. (N.B.)

* More good news from the Obama administration: details of the secret ACTA copyright treaty. Terrible.

* Soviet advertising. More. Still more. Via.

* The New Yorker pushes the vegetarian agenda in a review of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.

Foer seems particularly incensed by the suggestion that deciding not to eat meat represents a delusion of innocence or, worse still, sentimentality. “Two friends are ordering lunch,” he writes:

One says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” and orders it. The other says, “I’m in the mood for a burger,” but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?

Shades of 30 Rock, a hastily made video for the Cleveland Tourism Board.

Sunday night.

* Patton Oswalt says if you didn't like The Watchmen you should just shut up. Fair enough, but you know, that's not really the title... (via Bill, who promises via Twitter both a blog post and a Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast on this soon)

* We all want to flee to the Cleve: a new Bruce Springsteen exhibit opens at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 1. (Thanks, Brent!)

* Science fiction set in 2009. The Postman and Dark Angel are legit picks—but when your list needs three movies from the last two years, Family Matters, and an episode of Charmed to work, it's time to rethink.

* Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme, are we all Bernie Madoffs, and what comes next?

Linkdump!

* The headline reads, "Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected."

* Probably the stupidest thing ever published in the L.A. Times: a bald anti-science assertion that deadly allergies don't exist.

* 'Going Under': Doctors addicted to drugs. Via MeFi.

* Valuating Facebook in terms of Whoppers.

* I don't know if I'm more worried that my insomnia will lead to paranoia or Exploding Head syndrome.

* News that by this point will surprise no one: Arctic melt 20 years ahead of climate models.

* Legislation has been introduced for a post-Bush truth and reconciliation commission. This is something that is sorely needed, and I hope the Democratic leadership puts its full weight behind it.

* Blago: owned. More discussion here.

* The literary world is abuzz with news of Jack Torrance's latest, All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.

* Cory Doctorow on writing in an age of distraction.

* Things not to do: buying a $1000 house in Detroit. Big ups to Cleveland, which is apparently turning into Detroit.

(Thanks to Bill for some of these!)

Random.

* The Cleveland Plain Dealer doesn't like it when big-shot New Yorkers take shits on our beloved city.

* I thought I was raised in a country where we were all free to vote for the Lizard Person of our choice. I was wrong.

* By the way, it looks like Franken may actually win.

* Labor leaders like Obama's labor pick.

* "Area Woman Becomes Republican Vice Presidential Candidate." The Onion continues its Year-in-Review.

* James Howard Kunstler's "10 Ways to Prepare for a Post-Oil Society."

Cleveland's Plain-Dealer, which endorsed Bush (!) in 2000 and chose not to endorse anyone in 2004, endorses Barack Obama.

Kerry took 67% of the vote in Cuyahoga County in 2004, hoping to win the state on the back of Cleveland's comparatively huge population; unfortunately, putting aside questions of election malfeasance and voter suppression for the moment, the margin was such that Kerry would have needed upwards of 80% of Cuyahoga's vote to offset his losses elsewhere in the state.

The battle in Ohio this year will be about turnout, not newspaper endorsements, but every bit helps.

Obama rising in my old stomping ground: Quinnipiac puts him up 49-45 in Ohio. The last poll, from before either convention, had Obama up 44-43.



McCain can't win without Ohio, even if it takes back (in order of unlikelihood) Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado. If Obama retains those three and gets Ohio, he wins even if he loses Michigan (which he won't, not even if they cheat.)



Worth saying too that these numbers and those from other recent polls feed the speculation that McCain's national numbers are rising primarily due to consolidated support in the South.

On Oct. 27, 1984, a headline on Page 14A in The Plain Dealer read: "Disgusted judge gives repeat offender 30 years for rape."

The story followed standard newspaper protocol: In it, the victim was anonymous.

In this version, the victim has a name. I am Joanna Connors, and I am telling the story I kept private for 23 years. I'm doing it for all of the others who have survived sexual assault in silence, ashamed and afraid to tell their stories.

The moving story of Plain Dealer theater critic Joanna Connors, raped on a deserted stage in Case Western's Eldred Theater in 1984, as well as the story of her recovery and healing. The article, perhaps for legal reasons, ends with a discussion of how "safe" the Case Western campus ostentsibly is now—but this hit home for me so strongly precisely because an acquaintance of mine was attacked in a public space while we were there, too, and as far as I know the rapist was never caught.

I just know too many women who can tell some version of this story.

Via MeFi.

This is probably old news to most people, but I haven't been paying attention to either baseball news or Cleveland news and I've only just found out from Neil that they renamed Jacobs Field "Progressive Insurance Field."



This is an abomination. I'm still not over the Mets' plans to leave Shea, and Neil rubs salt in our mutual wound when he informs me they're moving to a place horribly named Citi Field.

Waiting on Super Saturday results, a few political links:

* The Cleveland Plain-Dealer endorses Obama. It's the largest newspaper in Ohio, which is good—but pragmatically speaking it's never really been Cleveland Obama has to worry about, it's the rest of the state...

* Pearl Jam has also endorsed Obama with the world's worst song, "Rock Around Barack." I wish they hadn't. Thanks Kendra for infecting my brain with this.

* At Daily Kos, DHinMI suddenly remembers the existence of Puerto Rico, whose 63 delegates at the final caucus on June 7 which could well determine the Democratic nominee. If you've ever wondered what a flag with 51 stars would look like, by the way, here's the planned design.

* I've seen links to Robin Morgan's "Goodbye to All That #2" more than a few times this week, and been emailed it once or twice as well. I think there's a lot to be said for many of the points it raises, especially regarding the unrepentantly misogynistic language that has been flung at Clinton since the '90s and into '08. (On other points, such as the experience and the celebrity-worship stuff, the piece is much less clear-eyed or fair.) Still, I'm not sure this election has come close to settling The Great Question of whether America is more sexist than it is racist—while it does seem as though America is more willing to be openly sexist than openly racist, there's still a whole range of other behaviors that go on behind-closed-doors and under-the-radar that cut the other way.

The fact is that Clinton has spent roughly half the time arguing that she's an independent woman and the other half of the time arguing that Hillary 44 would be a complete restoration of Bill 42—that her campaign is so reliant upon her spousal relationship with a former president necessarily flows against claims of Hillary's independence from Bill. She's muddied these particular waters herself.

Further, I don't think that this primary needed to be about identity politics in the first place, and to the extent that it has come to be about identity politics I think it is largely the Clinton camp's fault, which has played both the gender card (to its benefit) and the race card (which hugely backfired) when it thought either would work for them.

This primary has been ugly in just about every way a primary can be ugly, but it's myopic to wring your hands over just the ugliness that hurts your preferred candidate. In the heat of the campaign, any pundit can be guilty of that tendency—I know I haven't struck a completely fair balance either—but we should try and correct for it when we can.

I was all excited to link to Cleveland Is Dying, and It Is Beautiful when I saw the link on MetaFilter, but unfortunately the pictures of my old stomping grounds (go Spartans!) actually aren't all that evocative. As echo target quips in the thread, "Cleveland here doesn't seem to be dying so much as it's stepped out for a smoke and will be back in a minute." Still, Cleveland's problems are real, and they have a long history; the stark contrast between the wealth of University Circle and the poverty of areas immediately surrounding it never ceased to shock me the four years I lived there.

Dennis Kucinich, king of spin: how Dennis Kucinich remade himself from race-baiting bomb-thrower to liberal sweetheart. As a pro-Obama-or-Edwards progressive and former resident of Cleveland, I found this article really interesting, though it's quite a smearjob and I'm sure I'd be pretty unhappy about it if it had been launched against one of my preferred candidates.

"If you are mayor, you have to do things," says Mike Roberts, The Plain Dealer's former city editor. "There was nothing that he did of any success, unless it was self-serving."

City dwellers who could afford to flee did so in droves. Everyone else was holding on for dear life. "The town had a nervous breakdown during [Kucinich's] mayoralty," Larkin says. "He wore everybody out."

Yet almost 30 years later, Kucinich has managed to recast this period as his greatest triumph. In the revised telling, this isn't a story of a mayor who hurled the city into chaos with startling swiftness. It's a rewritten David and Goliath tale, with Kucinich playing the role as the only man with the cojones to stand up to corruption and nefarious corporations. His presidential campaign paints a man of sturdy principles, unsinkable optimism, and untainted liberal bona fides — a mythology now being regurgitated by everyone from supporters to the national media.

But here's this: the world's greatest band in the world's twenty-seventh greatest city, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band live in Cleveland, August 9, 1978.

Part 1
Part 2

Don't touch your dial. This is not a test.

Amazing new Web site ZIPskinny (via Matt Yglesias) gives detailed demographic information about all the places you've ever lived.

Where I grew up
Where I grew up in the other universe
Where I went to college
Where I went to grad school (part 1)
Where I live now (grad school parts 2 through 2012)

Beyond the obvious income and poverty line disparities, the thing that leaps out most when you use the comparison function is the marriage disparity—Randolph's 67.8% marriage rate dwarfs all the other locations. The continual proximity of colleges in my life must play a big role in this, but I doubt that's the full explanation.

Also of note is the final demographic showdown between Randolph and Jaimee's beloved Scotch Plains. Scotch Plains, with its biologically unstable surplus of females, proves no match for Randolph's frightening racial purity.