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.

Wednesday!

* Reports that Justice John Paul Stevens has hired fewer-than-usual clerks for the 2010 Supreme Court term are now confirmed: he's only hired one clerk, signaling a likely retirement in the near future.

* Seinfeld nostalgia is in full effect; FlowingData has your map of character connections.

* How to Talk to a Wingnut: Decoding Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

* Today's must-read op-ed: Bob Hebert on Texas's apparent execution of an innocent man. Even more striking than the fact of the terrible error is the look at the basic cognitive biases at work in the criminal justice system:

When official suspicion fell on Willingham, eyewitness testimony began to change. Whereas initially he was described by neighbors as screaming and hysterical — “My babies are burning up!” — and desperate to have the children saved, he now was described as behaving oddly, and not having made enough of an effort to get to the girls.

In short: "If he were innocent, they wouldn't have arrested him."

* Behind the scenes of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

* Harlan Ellison and Terminator.

* And the Hartford Courant has your photo of the day. Our public servants hard at work.

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?”

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.

Chris Hedges: 'The American Empire Is Bankrupt.' Seems a bit premature to me; empires, like relationships and Coke machines, have to rock back and forth a few times before they go over.

Angry denunciations at MeFi.

Metafilter links to your ultimate find-all-99-Seinfeld-reference photo. Here's your answer key.

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?

Anyone ever heard of this guy Jerry Seinfeld? He came to Raleigh last night and Jaimee took me out to see him. I gotta admit, he was pretty funny.

This epic Fark thread is my new favorite thing on the Internet.

Waiting for the liveblogging to begin, a few links.

* Sixty-one Nobel laureates have jointly endorsed Obama.

* So have donuts and bacon.

* Slate predicts McCain's next ten Hail Marys, while the L.A. Times takes on the potential downside of his "Great Man" strategy:

But as many Great Men come to learn, there is a colossal downside built into running a campaign on outsized personal virtue. The line between stoic, honorable service and showy moral vanity is oftentimes difficult to maintain.

And when a candidate confuses his own political ambitions with the fortunes of his country, that's when Great Men turn into self- parodies.

*Spencer Ackerman has the world's best wrap-up of the Great Campaign Suspension Stunt of '08.

Let's recap. McCain kinda-but-doesn't-really suspend his campaign to make himself the indispensable man in the bailout agreement. He gets to Washington as an object of ridicule and the deal falls apart -- something that at least some people, admittedly Democrats, attribute to McCain's transparent stunt. Then, despite Harry Reid saying he's going to keep the Senate in session until there's a deal, McCain abruptly announces he's... going back to campaigning (not that he stopped!) and will attend the debates.

* Entertainment Weekly interviews Stewart and Colbert.

* Far-right-wing columnist Kathleen Parker argues that Palin needs to step down in, of all places, the National Review (!).

McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

This backs up new claims that the McCain campaign is deeply panicked over her utter lack of ability.

* And Kevin Drum and Brad DeLong are doing their best to walk the blogosphere back from the brink on the bailout.

To get get a $500B macroeconomic gain in production and employment, Paulson wants to take on a position with an expected value of -$100B. But the true value of that position could be anywhere between +$200B and -$400B. Looks like a good bet to me.

Three for Sunday.

* Superbugs: all about the new generation of treatment-resistant infections.

“My basic premise,” Wetherbee said, “is that you take a capable microörganism like Klebsiella and you put it through the gruelling test of being exposed to a broad spectrum of antibiotics and it will eventually defeat your efforts, as this one did.” Although Tisch Hospital has not had another outbreak, the bacteria appeared soon after at several hospitals in Brooklyn and one in Queens. When I spoke to infectious-disease experts this spring, I was told that the resistant Klebsiella had also appeared at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, in Manhattan, and in hospitals in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, and St. Louis.

*Will the next Christopher Nolan movie be a straight-up adaptation of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns?

By leaving the Joker (literally) hanging at the end of The Dark Knight, Nolan left open-ended a story that begs to be finished. Even Tim Burton knew he had to kill Jack Nicholson at the "end". Nolan himself killed Ra's at the end of Batman Begins and he even tied-up a loose end regarding the Scarecrow in The Dark Knight. These are both clear signals Nolan knows the story has to have an end and has some idea for that end already in mind.

Nolan further foreshadows the future in The Dark Knight's climatic moments as well. Remember when the Joker tells Batman the two of them can "do this for years"? Filmmakers of Nolan's talent don't throw away lines like that, especially in a moment like that. That was the director signaling to the audience that he understands one of "The Dark Knight Returns'" main themes - that the Joker's very existence is primarily to be Batman's nemesis and their fates were inevitably intertwined, as well as a signal that their final showdown will in fact come years down the road.

Which brings us back to the three-act structure: Act One (Batman Begins) was the first Batman story. Act Two (The Dark Knight) was a classic tragic turning point.

So what does this demand Act Three be?

Well, not only the final battle of Batman and the Joker, but also the last Batman story, of course.

More discussion of the idea, which I can personally guarantee will never, ever happen, at io9.

* A not-quite-complete list of Kramer's business ideas. Not quite complete, because Wikipedia has even more.

Internet Tuesday!

* Parsippany, NJ, is looking to put up red light cameras that know you only came to a rolling stop before turning right on red. Dystopia is now.

* Are we already nostalgic for the Bush era? Salon investigates using the leaked trailer for Oliver Stone's W as its source text.

* Via Boing Boing, Crooked Timber has a pretty good piece up about the vacuity of the commonplace rhetoric that "managers of corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize corporate profits." It turns out, of course, that this duty actually refers to nothing in particular and can be used to justify any action.

So we’re left with “maximise the present value of future profits”, or maximise the intrinsic value of the company, which is already a bit of a problem because our maximand is now an intrinsically unobservable quantity, which reasonable people can differ wildly in their subjective assessment of. But even if we grant a massive epistemological free lunch and pretend that managers have a set of reliable conditional forecasts of the consequences of different courses of action, we’re still surprisingly far from a workable decision rule.

The reason is that all the paradoxes of choice theory which arise at the individual level are still there when you try to impose a maximisation rule for corporate decisions. For example, it can’t possibly be the case that we want an interpretation of “maximise the value of the shareholders’ equity” to mean that corporate managers have a fiduciary duty to play the (Defect) strategy in a business situation analogous to a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Or for that matter to be two-boxers in a business situation analogous to Newcomb’s Problem (such situations are incredibly common, as the kind of deals you are offered are very definitely related to people’s assessment of whether you’re the kind of guy who grabs every nickel he sees). Economists can ignore these problems and paradoxes in choice theory with a shrug of the shoulders, a mutter of “oh ordinary people, will you never learn” and a few quid for the Experimental Economics lab. But fiduciary duties are important things, so if we’re going to make our maximisation criterion into a fiduciary duty, then we have to interpret it in a way which allows for strategic behaviour.

* And the Pinocchio Theory has a similarly good post on capitalism, consumerism, and waste.

We are forced, as Karatani says, to buy back as consumers the very goods that we initially created as producers, and that were taken away from us. This “alienation” is the reason why my subjective jouissance as a consumer has nothing to do with my objectified toil as a producer. I do not consume in the same way that I produce. Even the money that I spend wastefully and gleefully, as a consumer, on (as Deleuze and Guattari say) “an imposed range of products (’which I have a right to, which are my due, so they’re mine’)” seems utterly disconnected from the money that I earn painfully in wages or salary — despite the fact that it is, of course, exactly the “same” money. It is only, and precisely, in such a climate of disconnection that “acts of consumption” can be exalted as our only possible “expressions of freedom.” Or, as Graeber puts it, “rather than one class of people being able to imagine themselves as absolutely `free’ because others are absolutely unfree,” as was the case under slavery, in consumer capitalism “we have the same individuals moving back and forth between these two positions over the course of the week and working day.”

* Corrections to Last Month's Letters to Penthouse Forum.

* List of fictional films from Seinfeld.

* And, via Neilalien, an in-depth investigation of why Star Trek: The Next Generation should actually be understood as a creative failure, in two parts. This sums it up pretty much exactly—like all huge nerds of a particular age I remember the show rather fondly, but it's no accident that it's been fifteen years since I watched an episode. And the point about "alternate universe" episodes is especially well-taken:

"Best of Both Worlds" has only one real rival for the title of "best TNG episode": "All Good Things". It's one of the best -- if not, hell, the best series finale I've ever seen. It summed up, in two hours, everything that was good about the show, as well as putting much of the preceding seven years to shame in terms of showcasing interesting, well-written, dynamic and downright awesome sci-fi writing. It deals with alternate realities -- TNG was always good when it dealt with alternate realities, probably because they could get away with the illusion of consequence in alternate realities where things could actually "happen", at least sort-of. Most importantly, watching "All Good Things", the viewer can fool themselves into thinking that there really was an alternate-universe TNG where all that cool character development and sharp writing came together every week, and not just a handful of times over the course of 178 freakin' episodes. But of course, since it was the last episode, they probably thought they could get away with actually changing things up a bit. A shame, that.

I liked "Parallels" and "The Inner Light", two more alternate-reality episodes that actually seemed to cut to the heart of the respective spotlight characters -- Worf, in a rare non-Klingon-centric starring role, and Picard himself. Again, though, in order to find something interesting to say about the characters, the writers had to go out of their way to concoct Rube Goldberg plot machines that would allow for emotional arcs without messing with the precious status quo. If you start looking, you can find a lot of episodes that go to the same well: there's always something to trigger or mitigate unusual behavior, something to excuse the characters from acting like real people as soon as they put on those damn Starfleet unitards.

Even now you see Heroes doing the same sort of thing with their repetitive "Bad Future" arcs, which give the illusion of plot rather than plot itself.

The incredible Dial B for Blog is back with in-depth looks at the secret origins of Batman and Jerry Seinfeld's love for Superman.

And speaking of kitsch, it's good to see Kundera being name-checked in discussions about the ne plus ultra of bullshit Fox News controversies, the sad, stupid tale of whether or not Obama should be wearing a flag pin on his lapel. Too bad it's only happening on blogs.

I very much supported, and was personally very moved by, the displaying of flags after 9/11. I think it was important, after the shock and trauma of that day, to grieve and to spend time considering who we are, together, as Americans. Very quickly, however, display of the flag metastasized into a mawkish symbol of tribal identification for the right, which is what it remains. If you front the flag, you're with us. If you don't, you're suspect. I think this obsession with things, furnishings, accoutrements, flag pins, commemorative plates, songs about boots in asses, is perfectly emblematic of patriotism as it exists for much of the right. It's become essentially a form of kitsch. Milan Kundera described this in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass. The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! The second tear makes kitsch kitsch.”

The flag pin has little to do with actual patriotism, has much to do with getting misty eyed over the idea of one's patriotism: "Yes, how wonderful that I am a patriot, with other patriots." Conservatives may willingly acquiesce to Bush's dismantling of the constitution, they may cheer for his ceaselessly disastrous foreign policy, but at least they're wearing their flag pins!

Obviously, by eschewing flag pins, Obama's not "ceding the flag," he's ceding the kitsch, and good for him.

UPDATE: It occurs to me a few minutes after posting that Seinfeld may in fact be the more necessary reference here: