Galley Brother B.J. sends along a link to this informative site about ArkahmCare.

Arkahm Asylum: “Even the most diseased mind can be cured.”

Jay Cost does terrible, unspeakable things to RNC chairman Michael Steele.

The Czabe uses the following clip of Joey Porter on his show all the time–and it’s awesome. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what he’s saying. He starts off at the 0:48 mark with “They shot me in Denver . . .” and after that? Czabe says it’s “they don’t want none,” but I’m not totally convinced.

It would be easy to make fun of Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s piece on porn and sex in the new Atlantic, for its leaning on Susan Sontag, its personal anecdotes (“. . . he asked if we could have anal sex. . . . and without hesitation, I complied”), and its wry dismissiveness about marriage:

Hard-core porn, which is what Internet porn largely traffics in, is undoubtedly extreme. But how is sex, as a human experience, anything less than extreme? Not the kind of sex (or lack thereof) that occurs in marriages that double as domestic gulags. Or what 30-somethings do to each other in the second year of their “serious relationship.”

But that would be a mistake, I think. In her own way, Vargas-Cooper is working out a natural law view of sex and pornography—and, despite the recurring theme of double-anal—it leads her to some pretty traditional places.

Santino sends word that the RLM review of Revenge of the Sith is up.

It’s 110 minutes, so pack a lunch.

A few months ago I wrote about the mythical age of the electric car and concluded:

The great irony is that there probably is a niche for the EV. Cars have always been badges and the electric car is no different. But instead of saying “I’m richer than you are” or “I’m cooler than you are,” the electric car says “I’m a better person than you are.” In Barack Obama’s America, surely there’s a market for that.

Now comes Bloomberg Businessweek with a triumphant piece on EVs that leads with the story of the gentleman who purchased the very first Nissan Leaf sold in America. Here’s how he explains his choosing of the Leaf over the Chevy Volt:

“In all the articles I read about the Volt, the Leaf was discussed as well,” he says. “As soon as I found out about the Leaf, I forgot about the Volt. The Volt wasn’t going to project the image I wanted. It has a tailpipe.”

The piece is one of those weird concoctions where you get the sense that it’s supposed to be unabashedly boosterish, yet it’s filled with really damning details.

Galley Friend Matt Continetti has an excellent piece looking at the current environment through the lens of the ’30s. This stuff is catnip for me:

Rather than one big crisis that unfurled over time, the 1930s was a series of rolling crises that coincided with and were shaped by one another. There was not only one thunderclap. There were several. There were moments during the Great Depression, for instance, when the economy improved​—​only to have the floor fall out from underneath it. There were false springs that quickly turned into harsh winters.

I went looking through the sources from December 1931 because I wanted to see if there were parallels between then and now. Why that particular month? Because it was two years into the Great Depression, just as we are two years into the Great Recession. Needless to say, historical analogies are imperfect. No two eras are alike. But it’s nonetheless true that certain themes connect our time with Churchill’s. . . .

There’s lots of awesome, like this:

On December 27, the New York Times reported that Hoover also wanted to “increase the capitalization of the Federal Land Bank System, enlarge the discount facilities of the Federal Reserve System, revise the banking laws to afford greater security to depositors, and increase taxation which he regards as necessary in the existing financial emergency.” The reaction to Hoover’s plan revealed that snark is not unique to postmodernity. “The president says that we must cushion the shock for our credit institutions (with government cush) so that industry can start moving again,” Howard Brubaker quipped in the New Yorker. “He is a great believer in federal aid for the unemployers.”

I won’t spoil the whole thing, but here’s one of the more interesting points:

And yet it would be wrong to overstate the commonalities between the Great Depression and the Great Recession. The differences are just as significant​—​if not more so. Most important of all is the difference in magnitude. There really is no comparison between the Depression and other modern financial panics. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the initial contraction lasted a whopping 43 months, from August 1929 to March 1933. During that time American output fell by close to 30 percent. The Great Recession, by comparison, lasted 18 months from December 2007 to June 2009. During that period U.S. gross domestic product contracted by about 4 percent.

In 1931, moreover, the U.S. unemployment rate was 15.9 percent. It would peak in 1933 at 25 percent. During the Great Recession, unemployment rose to 10.1 percent in October 2009 and stood at 9.8 percent in November 2010. What these percentages don’t convey, however, is the qualitative difference in unemployment then and unemployment now. There were no “automatic stabilizers” in the early 1930s. There was no unemployment insurance or deposit insurance or Social Security or Medicare or welfare or federal home lending. The millions of unemployed could not depend on federal aid. The poverty was real and omnipresent and debilitating. “Many old businesses are going to the wall,” Youngstown lawyer Benjamin Roth wrote in his diary on December 10, 1931, “and many of them lived thru 5 previous panics but never saw anything like this.”

The paradox is that, while Americans in the Depression were worse off than Americans today, they were nonetheless more optimistic. Jodie T. Allen of the Pew Research Center recently looked at public opinion during the Depression years and found that “despite their far higher and longer-lasting record of unemployment, Depression-era Americans remained hopeful for the future.” The Gallup organization began conducting regular surveys in 1935, so we have no polling data showing how people felt in December 1931. But if survey findings from later in the Depression are any indication, the country was filled with cockeyed optimists. Half of Depression-era Americans, Allen writes, expected the economy to improve in the next six months. Close to two-thirds told pollsters that their economic opportunities were at least as good or better than their fathers’.

The sunniness shows up in other sources as well. “Magazines and newspapers are full of articles telling people to buy stocks, real estate etc. at present bargain prices,” Benjamin Roth wrote in his diary on July 30, 1931. “They say that times are sure to get better and that many fortunes have been built this way.” On December 19, 1931, the Times gleefully reported: “A wave of buying enthusiasm swept over the security markets yesterday, producing the broadest recovery in more than two months.”

Read it all.

Galley Friend K.K. sends the following note about story placement at NYT.com:

The Times has the winner of the Rose Bowl, just below the lede on ‘new clubs for gay teens in Utah.”

This isn’t meant as a complaint, mind you, just an observation at how well the New York Times understands its audience.