Tuesday!

* Elsewhere in actually existing media bias: Rupert Murdoch supposedly wants to buy NBC Universal, for what I can only assume is pure spite.

* Yesterday's bogus insurance industry "bombshell" seems to have backfired, galvanizing support for reform and making the passage of some sort of public option more likely. Olympia Snowe just cast a vote for the Senate Finance Committee bill on its way out of committee, saying, "When history calls, history calls."

* This American Life is doing back-to-back shows on the same topic (health care) for the first time in its history this week and next. This week's episode on the doctor- and patient-side pressure that contribute to rising costs is quite good, if perhaps a bit generous to the insurance companies; next week's episode, promisingly entitled "Somebody Else's Money," will focus on the insurance companies themselves.

* If classic games had achievements.

* At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

In 2000 and 2001, four drivers in Nascar’s élite Sprint Cup Series were killed in crashes, including the legendary Dale Earnhardt. In response, Nascar mandated stronger seats, better seat belts and harnesses, and ignition kill switches, and completed the installation of expensive new barriers on the walls of its racetracks, which can absorb the force of a crash much better than concrete. The result is that, in the past eight years, no one has died in Nascar’s three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes. Last year, at Texas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell hit an oil slick, slammed head first into the wall at a hundred and eighty miles per hour, flipped over and over, leaving much of his car in pieces on the track, and, when the vehicle finally came to a stop, crawled out of the wreckage and walked away. He raced again the next day. So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?

* And bad news, everyone: we're post SF again.

My love of New Jersey and my love of This American Life collide in this week's replay of a TAL episode I've mentioned before about Hemant Lakhani, controversially arrested and sentenced to decades in jail for selling one U.S. government informant a fake missile provided to him by a different U.S. government informant. Turns out the U.S. attorney in the case and interviewed on the program is Chris Christie, currently leading the polls against Jon Corzine for governor of New Jersey. The case is misleadingly highlighted on Christie's Web site as one of his "cases that made a difference":

Obscure businessman and British citizen, Hemant Lakhani, came on the radar screen of the FBI because of his desire to broker the sale of shoulder-fired missiles to shoot down American passenger jets. His independent efforts to find an arms buyer and his persistence in completing a deal that would result in a terrorist attack in the United States sealed the image of someone predisposed and motivated to follow through with terrorist acts.

Chris Christie led the team that prosecuted Mr. Lakhani, ultimately securing a conviction and putting him behind bars for the rest of his life.

If you listen to the episode you'll see almost none of this is correct; in particular, the "deal" would certainly not have resulted in a terrorist attack on the United States because everyone involved but Mr. Lakhani was working on behalf of the United States government. Lakhani is a fool, but almost certainly not an arms trader and probably no danger to anyone—and to all appearances the Lakhani case is an debacle and an embarrassment for the DOJ, making no "difference" at all in the context of the larger prosecution of al Qaeda and highlighting the danger of career prosecutors who seek convictions over just results.

Monday night.

* This American Life has another of their must-listen episodes this week on the decades of governmental and private-sector regulatory corruption that made last year's financial collapse possible.

* Infrastructurist debunks the story I linked earlier claiming that trains can be less green than planes when the entire production process is taken into account.

After all, in the realm of pure possibilities, of course planes can be greener than trains. So can an SUV with 7 passengers. The real question is not about exceptional cases, but about averages.

...

What the headline writers did was cherry pick the trains with the highest calculated c02 emissions–the Green Line in Boston–were a bit higher than the emissions for some aircraft. And therefore planes can be greener.

* Swedish Pirate Party enters European Parliament.

The party advocates shortening the duration of copyright protection and allowing noncommercial file-sharing.

Engstrom said the court verdict in April against four men behind the popular Pirate Bay file-sharing site had boosted the party's support.

"Our membership tripled within a week of the Pirate Bay verdict," added Engstrom, "I think it just made people think that it had gone too far both in Sweden and the rest of Europe."

* Yikes. An Israeli couple are preparing to divorce after the man summoned a prostitute to his hotel room only to discover she was his daughter. In his email, Neil calls this "bad luck." I'd say that's putting it mildly.

Josh Marshall's post on tonight's terror arrests in New York raises once again the question of the extent to which the government's own investigative procedures are creating terrorists it can then arrest. (There's a great This American Life on this subject involving an "arms trader" sentenced to 47 years in prison after purchasing a dud missile from one government informant in order to sell it to another. This is not the only such case.) This is, we should take pains to remember, an extremely fraught question—these men, after all, did by all accounts plant what they believed to be bombs outside a synagogues—and a telling reminder of the difficulties inherent to prosecutions that we might naively assume were open and shut.

"Quimby the Mouse," a Chris Ware animation for the recent live This American Life.

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

Even if you think my periodic endorsements of This American Life are just so much hot air, you should really give a listen to this week's podcast, "Mistakes Were Made." Act 1 on the disastrous birth of the cryogenic movement is a great listen, and the William Carlos Williams spoofs in the second act are a good time too.

The Internet keeps distracting me.

* This is brazenly dishonest, even by Fox standards.

* When Reagan tried to convert Gorbachev to Christianity. You mean that's not the job he was elected to do?

* Great news, or greatest news? New Line pursuing a MacGyver movie. The opening to the MacGyver This American Life (free to stream) goes a long way towards explaining his continued appeal seventeen years after the show went off the air.

* David Chase's Sopranos follow-up has been announced: it's an epic history of the movie industry beginning in 1913.

* And get your "disrepecting the office" talking points ready: Barack Obama will be the first sitting president to go on The Tonight Show. If only Conan had already taken over...

For those who aren't already regular radio or podcast listeners, it's worth noting that this week's This American Life is another good show on the economy and the banking crisis. Until the next episode goes up over the weekend you can download this one for free; the previous two installments, The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show on the Economy, you've got to pay for you can stream for free but have to pay to download. (Thanks, Eric!)

How to become Ira Glass: an interview with Ira Glass. Via Kottke.

Still so many tabs.

* Gmail has a new 'offline' feature. I'm about to give it a whirl.

* Vermont: the least religious state. If only it weren't so cold...

* Lesbian separatist communities are dying out.

* A Republican who gets it: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky – one of the country’s highest-ranking Republicans – will warn his party leadership later this afternoon that the GOP is rapidly turning into a regional party that can’t compete with Democrats at the national level.

* Having become a recent acolyte of This American Life, I can now say taht Kasper Hauser's TAL parodies are fairly well-executed.

* The alternative comics apocalypse has begun.

As befits a gray-haired eminence, I have recently fallen in love with episodes of This American Life, which I now download and listen to constantly. Using a number of "Best Of" websites, I've had great results with Act V, Fiasco!, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, and the two most recent shows on the economy (1, 2), with eight more episodes waiting on my iPod.

The best one I've listened to yet is naturally Superpowers, just wall-to-wall awesome with appearances from Chris Ware, John Hodgman, Zora, and Jonathan Morris from the Gone but Not Forgotten blog—and best of all it turned me on to this very early Chris Ware story once hosted on TAL's website. If you've never heard one of the *really good* TAL episode, start here.

Pclem matches yesterday's Confessions of a Superhero post with a This American Life segment about a man who began dressing in a hand-sewn Superman costume after his wife passed away. The Superman segment starts about half an hour in.

Closing a few open tabs.

* The New York Times has an article on Fermi problems and the importance of intuition in mathematics. (There's a game.) (Via Boing Boing.) Kottke links to some such calculations at 3quarksdaily, saying they used to be part of the interview process of Microsoft and Google.

* Roger Ebert explains why some people say he gives movies too many stars.

* The new season of the Ricky Gervais podcast is out.

* More radio: an episode of This American Life from May that explains the origins of the mortgage crisis.

* And Bill Gates is investing heavily in algae fuel. We're saved!

Chris Ware has illustrated another short piece for season 2 of Showtime's This American Life. Here's the first one, too, from season one.





This guy's got to stop doing all these side projects and get back to work on those long, long awaited follow-ups to Jimmy Corrigan...