This interview with Liz Smith might be the most charming thing I’ve read in weeks. It’s so rare to see a person who’s entirely original.

This Josh Kraushaar piece strikes me as pretty much right: liberals have made such a fetish of identity politics over the last eight years that it’s hard to imagine how the Democratic party could nominate another straight white male as their presidential candidate in the foreseeable future. Almost certainly not in 2016. Probably not in 2020. And the demographics of the question keep accelerating the situation as minorities make up larger shares of the Democrats because of white flight from the party.

And there are so many firsts to be made: first woman, first Hispanic, first WOC, first gay man, first lesbian, first gay/lesbian of color. It could be that by the time the party has gotten around to checking all of these boxes they’ll even be ready and eager for a first trans nominee.

This addiction to identity raises the following question: When will the Democrats nominate another straight white guy? Place your bets below.

I appreciate NH’s commitment to the Liberty or Death brand: http://t.co/jh4EKaAfmN pic.twitter.com/1oxvCFfOvg

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 6, 2015

Just a reminder: Matt Yglesias doesn’t know anything about the economics and sociology of the family, either.

Though I bet he skimmed through part of an Atlantic article on the stuff once and follows @stephaniecoontz on Twitter. Which totally makes him expert enough to write about the subject.

Somehow Meerkat has died just two weeks after it took over the world. I know, it’s amazing, right?

About three days after it received a lavish new funding round, Meerkat died an ugly and embarrassing death. . . .

The mobile streaming app that had whipped U.S. tech journalists into a frenzy announced $14 million in new funding on Thursday. Money poured in from Jared Leto, Greylock Partners and other illustrious sources. On the same day, Twitter launched its rival streaming app called Periscope. Apparently, investors didn’t stop to ponder why Meerkat people rushed to cash in so aggressively only a month after the app had debuted. . . .

By Sunday night, the consumer reaction to the Periscope-Meerkat rivalry was brutally lopsided. Twitter’s Periscope app had become a smash hit, breaking into the U.S. iPhone top-30 chart by Friday night. This is a rare feat for a social media app, and it demonstrated that Periscope had immediate and broad consumer appeal.

In stunning contrast, Meerkat crumpled like a wet napkin as soon as Twitter’s rival app debuted. By Sunday at 7:00 p.m., Meerkat had collapsed to No. 523 on the U.S. iPhone download chart.

The ugly truth that U.S. tech media has declined to mention even in passing is that Meerkat had never been a hit to begin with. All those breathless media reports about “the hot new app” and “the break-out app” were deeply misleading at best — and cynical legerdemain at worst.

Via Galley Friend S.M., my gift to you: A beautiful arrangement of the “Ballad of Serenity”. Sung in a hotel room by three of the guys from The Flash.

High level awesome.

I love–love—this piece in Fortune by Andres Traslavina slugged “How social media can actually help you get hired.” This is the career advice equivalent of arguing that getting struck by lightning can actually give you super speed.

Sample d-baggery:

You can back up the experiences on your resume by pointing to specific examples of work stored on your social channels. . . .

During the interview, point to a project you have uploaded to LinkedIn, a video on YouTube, or a series of tweets demonstrating your knowledge of the company. When you can show authentic social interactions to back your resume, you will definitely be one step ahead of the competition.

Just out of curiosity: What do you think the ratio is of people who have gotten jobs because of a series of tweets, to the number of people who have lost jobs because of a series of tweets?  Ten-thousand to one? More?

But the best comes in the next graph where the guy dishing out the career advice tells readers:

You may be good at many things, but your typically only great at a few. [sic]

I suspect that mastering basic grammar might impress people more than loading projects onto LinkedIn, but who knows.

Jay Cost has jumped in and taken Santino one better, by digging up the Rotten Tomatoes scores and recalibrating the Action Franchise Rankings By Science. Jay put his data set here, and included some fancy advanced statistics like mean, median, and standard deviation.

The result has Indiana Jones up top, followed by the Connery Bond movies, with Mission: Impossible firmly in the middle.

This is a really helpful reminder of how bad data can lead to bad science. Look, I’m as open to the subjectivity of art as the next guy. But Rotten Tomatoes is just garbage and I become automatically suspicious whenever I see an article try to justify a statement by appealing to RT numbers.

For instance, maybe you don’t love the original Mission: Impossible like I do. I can understand that. That’s a Subjective Response to Art.

But RT scores Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull Nuking the Fridge substantially better than it does Mission: Impossible. And that’s just wrong. Nobody really thinks that. Indy 4 is a punchline and M:I is, at worst, a cult classic. Hell–RT says that Moonraker is better than the original M:I. Have you seen Moonraker? It’s schlock.

But if you don’t cotton to M:I, look at the RT scores for the Bourne movies. I love the first two Bournes. Great flicks. But the third is terrible, easily the worst of the series. Yet RT scores Bourne 3 far above either of the first two Bourne movies. As I said, this is just wrong. As the Marxists used to say, objectively so.

All of that said, JCost is awesome for doing this.