Links for a Thursday without joy.

* Don't forget about him: John Hughes has died.

* Margaret Atwood, Twitterer.

* The Big Picture visits Hiroshima 64 years ago today.



* Long Vanity Fair profile of Mad Men and Matthew Weiner. Best show on TV. Via Kottke.

“Matt wants real,” said Charlie Collier, president of AMC. For Weiner, Collier continued, “it’s not television; it’s a world.” Perhaps the only other producer as committed to the rules of his imagined universe is George Lucas. “Perfectionism” is a word the show’s writers tossed around when I asked a group of them about working with Weiner. “Fetishism” was another. Alan Taylor, who has directed four episodes of Mad Men, labeled Weiner’s attention to detail “maniacal.” Call it what they will, it is a charge that is largely embraced. “We’re all a little bit touched with the O.C.D.,” Robin Veith, one of the writers, told me, describing how she and her colleagues have researched actual street names and businesses in Ossining, the suburb where Don and Betty live; checked old commuter-train schedules, so that they know precisely which train Don would take to the city; pored over vintage maps to learn which highways he would drive on.

* Towards a four-day work week.

* And Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed, 68-31, making her the first Latina woman racist on the Supreme Court.

I missed it over the weekend, but Matthew Weiner will be back with Mad Men for at least two more seasons.

Thinking of the days when this blog wasn't about the presidential election 24-7—just sixteen long days to go—here are a few links to more traditional gerrycanavan.blogspot.com fare.

* Life on earth may have originated in volcanic eruptions.

* Invest in solar, says solar industry.

* 'Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death.' Via MeFi.

* Atomic explosions. Lots.

* Buy your own deep shelter underneath London.

* How British police foiled the IRA by opening a laundromat.

* Mad Men will be back for a third season, but showrunner Matthew Weiner may not be: he wants more money.

* Consistent with Environmental Security Hypothesis predictions, when social and economic conditions were difficult, older, heavier, taller Playboy Playmates of the Year with larger waists, smaller eyes, larger waist-to-hip ratios, smaller bust-to-waist ratios, and smaller body mass index values were selected. These results suggest that environmental security may influence perceptions and preferences for women with certain body and facial features.

Design Observer pays homage to AMC's excellent Mad Men, the first season of which Jaimee and I finished up watching on DVD last night. This particular homage is all about Mad Men's depiction of the advertising business—which I suppose is something it's rather good at—but it's really the subdued dystopianism of the show's 1960 Manhattan setting that grabs me. Matthew Weiner (who as Design Observer informs us earned a job on The Sopranos on the basis of his spec script for Mad Men) has a very keen eye for cultural critique, and in accordance with something I once wrote of Terry Gilliam never allows his 1960 to become so reified that we forget the different ways in which we're also talking about the present. There's a nice cartoonishness to the satire that's fun, but also necessary: it functions as a kind of critical prophylactic so that we're never allowed to understand Mad Men as mere history.

The critique of American consumerism is as subtle as a sledgehammer, but it's solid, and I can't think of any other show that's ever been more focused or forceful on the realities of misogyny. This is very good stuff.