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?

Still more links.

* Shepard Smith: Fox News's email has become "more and more frightening." I've asked before, but why is this man still on Fox?

* Rush Limbaugh picked the wrong day to make a birther joke.

* Jeremiah Wright picked the wrong day to say something incredibly moronic about "them Jews."

* There is no right day to propose a Full House remake. Stamos! Via Occasional Fish.

* Fear the Emanuel hegemony.

* Fear the myth of perpetual copyright.

* 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive. In terms of understanding the human psyche, the academy is still decades behind the advertising industry.

* 'Supervolcano may be brewing beneath Mount St Helens.' Yikes. (And get me Bobby Jindal on the phone.) Via MeFi.

* Guantánamo's Uighurs have been sent to Palau. More from Yglesias, Attackerman, Greenwald, and the Plank.

* Linda Holmes criticizes Pixar for going to the princess well for its first female lead.

* The Sopranos and postmodern irony.

Yet formally self-conscious and deliberately ambiguous though it tended to be, "The Sopranos" was by no means so completely decentered in its “overall moral or thematic attitude” as all that. On the contrary, it seems to me to have been very definitely grounded what might be called (for want of any better phrase) a deeply pessimistic Freudian moral sensibility.

Via Kotsko.

Late-night roundup.

* Senate Republicans won't fight Sotomayor.

* Gay-rights activists are balking at taking Prop 8 to federal court; they think they'll lose at the Supremes given the courts' current composition.

* 15 Sexist Vintage Ads. So glad sexism is behind us.

Son of news roundup.

* Burger King is pushing the viral marketing hard lately, following up its gag body spray with a Facebook application that gives you a free hamburger for every 10 people you unfriend.

* Speaking of body spray, here's an interesting study suggesting it's not about the smell.

And a new study in the U.K...found that men who used Lynx deodorant, Axe's British-brand cousin, were seen as more attractive by females than men who used a "placebo" deodorant with no fragrance.

But: the women just saw videos of the guys in the study—they couldn't smell them. Meaning that Axe actually works by making you feel more attractive. If you feel more attractive after soaking yourself in an aerosol version of car air freshener, you may not be the most urbane man to begin with, which leads to the second part of the study's results:

Women rated the fragranced men as more attractive when the sound on the videos was off, but had no statistically significant preference when the sound was on.

* Obama to team up with Spider-Man. Which wanted criminal will he pall around with next?

* Zipcar comes to Duke. More here.

* Larry Flynt says porn needs a bailout. Via MeFi.

* Creative billboards.

* Malcolm X on a Canadian game show.

* The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.

* It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. Gary Lutz on the sentence, via the too-sporadically-updated Black Garterbelt.

* And will The Dark Knight win Best Picture? Eli Glasner says it just might.

Politics Monday.

* A funny thing happened to Michele Bachmann: after her neo-McCarthyite rant on Hardball, her opponent raised almost $400K overnight, with her primary opponent re-entering the race as a write-in candidate in protest. Bachmann's now desperately trying to backpeddle.

* Republican arrested for voter-fraud registration. ACORN still exonerated.

* West Virginia electronic voting machines don't work, either: purely by accident, they keep switching votes to McCain.

* Indiana gave us Shankar D and it currently feeds my good friends Brent and Lisa. But will it give us President Obama?

* Memo to the McCain campaign: the hate isn't working and your Hail Marys bombed. Try something else.

* Or, you know, don't: John McCain doesn't really seem to mind losing. A lot of "moderate" conservatives, too, seem okay with it, most of them rightly blaming Sarah Palin. I tell you this, I sure hope the far right manages to make her the nominee in 2012.

* It turns out McCain's also made himself far less available to the press than even Palin, having not taken any questions since September.

* Early voting starts in Florida today, where the right-leaning RCP average puts the race at +3.2 Obama, who will spend the next three days there campaigning with Hillary Clinton.

* More early voting facts and figures at The Caucus and (especially) elections.gmu.edu. TPM reports that the numbers so far favor Obama.

* Encouraging signs: McCain has $47 million left to spend. Obama has much, much more.

* In the New York Times, Dr. Lawrence Altman has concerns about the candidates' health, McCain's in particular.

* Al Gore will host an election night webcast for the Obama campaign as part of its "Building the New Energy Economy" theme.

* And Obama is your marketer of the year. Seems about right.

You know, for kids: Obama's quietly bought advertising in a whole lot of video games. Screenshots here.

Weird vintage ads, at Weirdomatic.

Ev'ning links.

* It is totally, 100% appropriate to have paid product placement on the morning news.

* Slouching towards idiocracy: the L.A. Times is shutting down its book section.

* It hasn't been a very good week for John McCain. Having successfully goaded Obama into making a tremendously successful overseas trip that has managed to erase any lingering justification for McCain's own candidacy, he's now reduced to bitter rants that even a Villager like Joe Klein characterizes as scurrilous and desperate:

John McCain said this today in Rochester, New Hampshire:

This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.

This is the ninth presidential campaign I've covered. I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.

* I hadn't heard very much crowing from early Obamaniacs on the internets, and I'm glad of that, but the netroots should really be breathing sighs of relief that they didn't get their way about John Edwards:

The National Enquirer spent months chasing John Edwards and digging into his relationship with Rielle Hunter before busting him spending the night in a hotel with the woman and the former Democratic presidential candidate's alleged love child.

* And The Edge of the American West remembers the Detroit riots, 41 years ago today.

Flag-waving American companies are cheating on us with China.

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.

Billboards that look back.

Gawker has a report of a billboard on Prince St. in New York City (between Mulberry and Mott Streets, if you're local) that uses hypersonic sound beams that use your skull as a speaker, giving the impression that the advertisement is coming from inside your head.

Ban this technology now. Thanks to Neil for the terrifying vision of things to come.

Since we've been doing so much Wes Anderson stuff around here lately, it seems like a natural time to return to his classic American Express commercial.



Earlier in the month it was announced that he'll be doing some AT&T ads. Let the great selling-out recommence!

As if the ludicrous badness of the last season of 24 weren't enough to put you off the show forever, there's 24: Day Zero, which looks to be a canonical series of deodorant commercials.