Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2848

Blue Flight To A Red State, Ctd

Yglesias thinks this map is misleading.

Politics - United States - Barack Obama - China - Washington Post

Bear Cub Sneeze Watch

The panda has some competition:

Hosting - Web Design and Development - Free - Sports Related - Object-Oriented

Testing Epistemic Closure

Conor notes this statement by Mark Steyn:

The media's attitude to "honor killings" is not only shameful and
dishonors the dead; it's also part of the reason why America's
newspapers are sliding off the cliff: Their silence on this issue is
merely an especially ugly manifestation of how their news instincts have
been castrated by political correctness.

Thus is reproduced as fact at the Corner, the way Newsweek uses a campaign book like Going Rogue as self-evidently part of the historical...

The View From Qatar

Tom Gross rounds up some of the worst anti-Semitic cartoons published in the Middle East since the Mava Marmara killings. Ugh.

Middle East - Antisemitism - Tom Gross - Warfare and Conflict - Jews

"Turkish Gaullism"

A different take on Erdogan's shift toward populism, Islamism and nationalism:

If you scratch the surface of what seems to be a secular versus Islamist divide in Turkish attitudes toward the West, you will quickly see that both the so-called Islamist and secular camps embrace the same narrative vis-à-vis Europe and America: nationalist frustration. New obstacles to EU accession, perceived injustice in Cyprus, growing global recognition of the Armenian genocide and Western sympathy for Kurdish...

Marriage And Children: The Link Weakens Some More

Tara Parker-Pope finds:

Only 41 percent of respondents said children were important to a
happy marriage, down from 65 percent in 1990. The only thing
important to a happy marriage than children, the survey found
whether a couple agreed on

So why do kids rank so low on the list? The fact is, marriages today are increasingly adult-centered, ratherthan child-centered, an issue identified in a sweeping 2008 report fromRutgers marriage researcher Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. In the...

The Habits Of Highly Ineffective People

Dan Ariely made a list. Number four:

Checking email is addictive in the same way gambling is. You see, yearsback the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that rats wouldwork much harder if the rewards were unpredictable (rather than a treatevery 5 times they pressed a bar, one would come after 4, then 13,etc). This is the same as email, most of it is junk, but every sooften, it's fantastic: an email from the woman you've been chasing forinstance. So we distract ourselves from work by...

The Drug War, Across The Border

Diego Valle Jones created a statistical analysis of Mexico's drug war:

In the beginning, the war proved a success by all objective measures: in2007 the homicide rate decreased to its lowest level in recordedhistory and murders in Michoacan went down by more than 40%. Not thatit mattered much, all the while the government was losing thepsychological war—the use of torture and beheadings became common inexecutions carried out by drug cartels as they sought to protect theirturfs and...

When Fonts Attack

Comic Sans delivers an enjoyable foul-mouthed rant.
















Comic Sans - Fonts - Graphics - art - Individual Designers

The American View Of Soccer, Ctd

A reader writes:

The success of the US in the World Cup won't be the impetus for a large growth in soccer fandom in the US.  The World Cup only happens every four years and people's memories are short.  When we are producing worldwide stars - and better yet, if they are playing regularly in the US - that will bring the fans.  We Americans love winning, but we love stars more.  If the US is able to produce a Pele, Maradona, or even a Beckham, soccer will grow in popularity more than FIFA...