The end result is a bunch of fake action surrounding the fake reunion show, but it is really the real reunion, because they're all back.

Gawker tries to parse the various levels of the Seinfeld reunion taking place on this season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, not only the greatest thing currently on television but one of the single best things that has ever aired.

When [Larry] David approached [Jerry] Seinfeld about a reunion plot on Curb in spring 2008, the comedian wasn’t terribly worried about mucking around with the legacy of his beloved nine-season show. “The idea of working with Larry was just too overwhelmingly appealing to me, and [Curb] is such a great show,” he says. “There was a little part of me that said, ‘Do we really want to tamper?’…But to hell with it. How much damage can you really do?”

I have it on good authority that my friend Traxus was totally making fun of someone else in this post on blogging styles. That said, some unhappy Monday links.

* As you've probably already heard, Michael Jackson's death has now been ruled a homicide. Let the feeding frenzy resume.

* Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. named a veteran federal prosecutor on Monday to examine abuse of prisoners held by the Central Intelligence Agency, after the Justice Department released a long-secret report showing interrogators choked a prisoner repeatedly and threatened to kill another detainee’s children. A good day for America (and for the rule of law). Hopefully this is the beginning and not the end.

* NJ-Gov: Christie's lead has all but disappeared in the face of weeks of bad press. More from TPM.

* Elsewhere in New Jersey news UPDATE: from 1970: Foster parents denied right to adopt because the father is an atheist.

In an extraordinary decision, Judge Camarata denied the Burkes' right to the child because of their lack of belief in a Supreme Being. Despite the Burkes' "high moral and ethical standards," he said, the New Jersey state constitution declares that "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshiping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience." Despite Eleanor Katherine's tender years, he continued, "the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit, and not be influenced by prospective parents who do not believe in a Supreme Being."

People who love to tell New Atheists to sit down and shut up, take note.

* 'How to Kill a City': from an episode of Mad Men yesterday to the pages of the New York Times today. Via @mrtalbot.

* The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition.

* 12 Greenest Colleges and Universities, at Sustainablog. Vermont once again takes high honors.

* 'Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox.' (Via Ze.) This is actually an important plot point (with some nice twists) in a novel I've touted a few times here, Accelerando.

* And Fimoculous has your Curb Your Enthusiasm preview.

The seventh season of David's improvised HBO comedy, which returns on Sept. 20, will be centered around the TV version of David finally agreeing to do a reunion of the defining '90s sitcom. All four "Seinfeld" castmembers -- Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards -- will play themselves in multiple episodes, and the season finale will feature extensive snippets of the show-within-the-show.

It should be said again: the premise for the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm is truly inspired.

Late night links.

* Here comes your Seinfeld reunion. God bless Larry David.

* You won't have Dr. Sanjay Gupta to kick around anymore.

* From My Unfinished Doctoral Dissertation on Breakfast Cereal.

* The artist-less art of Tim Knowles.

* ...each extra close friend in high school is associated with earnings that are 2 percent higher later in life after controlling for other factors. I had no idea I was so deeply disliked. (via MR)

* The headline reads, 'Diebold Voting System Has 'Delete' Button for Erasing Audit Logs.' No way that could be abused. Via MeFi.

A few more missing links from the last few days.

* What sort of game are Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld playing? First the pilot for Curb Your Enthusiasm is a preemptive parody of Comedian, several years before the fact—now Jerry Seinfeld has signed with NBC to do a reality TV show that sounds like nothing so much as Curb Your Enthusiasm.

* Supermen of Pre-Golden-Age SF.

* How they made The Godfather.

* Is Switzerland the next Iceland?

* The Milky Way Transit Authority.

* Simulation of a black hole destroying a star.

* And is the FiveThirtyEight.com brand ruined?

Curb Your Enthusiasm is returning for a seventh season. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty pretty good.

Marc Ambinder takes a stab at predicting Obama's VP, but misses the smart bet completely: Gen. Wesley Clark. Clark might well have been Clinton's VP and was, I think, the most likely choice for Obama VP even before the race took the shape it has. But Clark's vocal support for Clinton just makes the likelihood of his being picked as Obama's VP all the more likely—picking Clark now becomes a unity move that brings the party back together.

Biden has an outside chance, and Bill Richardson probably has a slightly better chance than Biden—but I still think it'll be Clark.

If it isn't Clark, I think that will be because Obama has decided either that he needs to double down on "change" and pick someone else who represents the future, or else decides the better unity move is to select a woman, or both. In this case look at Obama endorsers like Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, or Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill.

But Obama should keep in mind, if this is indeed his thinking, that there's only one way to lock up now and forever the Jaimee Hills/Larry David demographic, and that's to pick California Senator and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Barbara Boxer.

UPDATE: Right, Republicans. Can Huckabee get enough support to edge out Romney? Condoleezza Rice has already said she won't do it, and it would have been hard to imagine the Republicans really picking her despite the obvious demographic advantages she brings to the table.

Is there anyone else who is even on the radar screen over there?

Cell-phone jammers: threat or menace? I understand why these things have to be illegal, but there have been plenty of times I would have loved to have one (and I've been known to be a cell-phone chatterer myself).

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people,” said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. “The cellphone talker thinks his rights go above that of people around him, and the jammer thinks his are the more important rights.”

No, no! The jammer is an altruist; she jams for the community.

And of course, there's always the Larry David option:



Via Steve. MetaFilter has more discussion.

Links for this fine Monday:

* Marjane Satrapi interviewed in the New York Times.

I don’t very much like this term of graphic novel. I think they made up this term for the bourgeoisie not to be scared of comics. Like, Oh, this is the kind of comics you can read.

* Using Curb Your Enthusiasm (which is having a terrific creative renaissance in its sixth season, by the way) to treat schizophrenia, in the New Yorker.

* The PETA article up today at Salon is interesting insofar as it demonstrates the hostility to environmental and animal-rights movements that dominates popular discussion of these issues. Even though (aside from the hyperbolic "#1 cause!!" claim) PETA is otherwise correct that a meat diet significantly contributes to global warming and other environmental hazards, the article is still framed from the headline on as "Suck on this, PETA." I'm not even sure why the PETA angle was necessary in the first place; couldn't the same article have been written without name-checking a hated fringe group?

* In other environmental news, another new report argues that we passed peak oil in 2006.

* I haven't commented yet on this whole Raymond Carver kerfluffle, and I don't have much to say now, except that I think there's a good argument to be made that Gordon Lish was the actual writer of those stories, not Carver, and that in any event it's as certain that they should be left alone as it is that a collection of the "original versions" will be out next year.

The case is complicated by the fact that Carver himself, unlike Eliot, seems to have persisted in preferring his own original versions (though this is a murky matter too). He went on to publish a rewrite of The Bath entitled A Small Good Thing. In it, the painfully bleak ending is replaced by an upbeat reconciliation scene, with the baker turning out to be a sweet, vaguely Christ-like guy, and the parents reconvening at his store where he plies them with some heavily symbolic warm bread and pastries - a scene of saccharine religiosity that betrays the hard truth of the tale, replacing it with the sentimental wishfulness of the teller. A lot of people prefer it, but then a lot of people prefer bad art that makes them feel good to good art that makes them feel bad.

* Searching for God in the brain. Bet he's not in there, either.

I'm surely going to hell for thinking it, but as sorry as I am to hear Larry David's marriage has fallen apart, I'm very hopeful that it will eventually wind up as the plot of a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.