NBA games appear to be dramatically biased towards ties, with a tie twice as likely as either team winning by one point. Details and speculation at the link. Via Kottke, who notes a similar phenomenon in golf.

Oink, oink, baby, in the most Orwellian and neo-Freudian senses.

* At McSweeney's: Saved by the Bell: The Grad School Years.

* The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital.

* J.G. Ballard's Alien and Starsky and Hutch.

* Every time a bell rings a volcano erupts, Bobby Jindal doesn't become president.

* Life as a $100,000-a-year clown.

* Life as the world's hottest basketball prospect—in sixth grade.

Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always contained an element of fascism. It wasn’t just that a cuckoo notion like Le Corbusier’s “radiant city,” those celery stalks of lone skyscrapers surrounded by a verdant wasteland, was meant to simplify life, but that it was in some basic sense meant to replace it.

Charles Taylor considers contemporary architecture and its "starchitects" in the context of the controversy surrounding Frank Gehry's latest and largest project, the planned Atlantic Yards stadium in Brooklyn for the New Jersey Nets.

Gehry might have taken The Life and Death of Great American Cities as an anti-text. With its interior “public space,” its super-blocks, its potential for creating what Jacobs called “border vacuums” and the attendant crime that always accompanies such areas, in the way it cuts itself off from the neighborhoods around it and cuts them off from each other, Atlantic Yards represents the sort of thinking Jacobs discredited nearly fifty years ago.

Atlantic Yards is the largest project Frank Gehry, now seventy-eight, has ever undertaken. And if it proves to be his last large project, it will be a fitting capstone to a career utterly blind to the public function of architecture. For how better to assert your dedication to personal expression over context than to have your distinct visual style serve as the emblem for the death of two Brooklyn neighborhoods?

The top 25 documentaries, as ranked by the International Documentary Association in October 2007. Via kottke. Here's the top 11:

1. Hoop Dreams (1994), Steve James
2. The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris
3. Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore
4. Spellbound (2002), Jeffrey Blitz
5. Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), Barbara Kopple
6. An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Davis Guggenheim
7. Crumb (1994), Terry Zwigoff
8. Gimme Shelter (1970), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
9. The Fog of War (2003), Errol Morris
10. Roger & Me (1989), Michael Moore
11. Super Size Me (2004), Morgan Spurlock

I've never really had the head to follow sports—I can never remember players' names, and my attention is constantly sidetracked by my obsession with rule paradoxes and loopholes. Aside from World Cup soccer and NCAA basketball, I'm useless. So it's not surprising that this story made me sit up and take notice of the NBA in a way I haven't since I was a bookish teenager trying to fake it: The league has overturned a game result for bad officiating for the first time since 1982. The Hawks and the Heat will now replay the last 51.9 seconds of a three-point game the next time they're scheduled to meet.