Still shaking out the redesign a bit here and there. Comments exist, but only on the stand-alone post pages, so you have to click on the headline to get to them.

Galley Friend X submits the following question. I don’t know congressional politics in granular detail, but maybe there’s an obvious answer:

Honest question: Have white Democrats ever elected a black congressman? That is, has a black D ever been elected from an non-minority-majority district? I can’t think of any. But every black R is, essentially, elected by white people. (And we’re the racists!)

There’s probably an obvious answer to this–maybe a big-city district that isn’t quite minority-majority, but is maybe 35 percent African-American. But like I said, I don’t know off the top of my head.

It’ll be interesting to see what Princeton neuroscience professor / amateur poll modeler / political hack Sam Wang has to say today.

You will recall that a mere four weeks ago Wang was pushing his way into the public square to insist that Democrats had a 63 percent chance of holding the Senate. Like all normal pollsters, his model mysteriously followed the herd in the weeks that followed, making Republicans a slight favorite to take control of the Senate. But even his final model predicted that GOP 54–which is where we are most likely headed–had only a 5 percent chance of occurring.

I wouldn’t single Wang out for special ridicule–everybody makes mistakes–except for three things:

1) He went out of his way to throw a lot of elbows at Nate Silver and everyone else following the election in an attempt to get attention for himself. This wasn’t just some guy, working his own quirky model, and seeing what happened. Wang was obviously on the make and in a particularly unattractive manner. See, for instance, this tweet:

@QuiteColdNight Stu Rothenberg thinks GOP will pick up >7 Senate seats? That is so wrong it does not even deserve the word “wrong”

— Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) September 9, 2014

2) You didn’t even need a model to see that 54 seats was the most likely outcome. Lots of things from last night were surprising: The gubernatorial results and the margins in places like KS, VA, and KY. But the overall Senate number of 54 always seemed like the single most likely of all possible outcomes. And to have a model which gave GOP 54 the same percentage chance as Dem 51 was pretty obviously flawed.

3) Now, there’s nothing wrong with building a deeply flawed model–people make mistakes–except for how condescendingly boorish Wang was  about it. Remember the great quote from his Daily Beast profile:

He is the author of two books on the brain and his recent work focuses on autism. Politics, he says, is just kind of a hobby. “It’s a relatively easy problem compared with the other things I do,” he told me.

Wang should go back to studying autism. I understand that if he does that, the New Yorker and the New York Times won’t pay attention to him anymore and he’ll lose some Twitter followers, but so what. He’s almost certainly better at neuroscience than he is at politics and it’s more important work–much more important–anyway.

But he ought to apologize for having been such a tool on his way out the door.

Galley Friend Mark Hemingway has a fantastic piece up about Lena Dunham’s sexual . . . experimentation? . . . on her much younger sister. I can’t recommend it enough. The Dunham family has tried to put this episode to bed by having the now-adult younger Dunham sister declare the Smith College version of “no harm, no foul.” On Twitter, of course. Here’s Grace Dunham:

As a queer person: i’m committed to people narrating their own experiences, determining for themselves what has and has not been harmful

— Grace Dunham (@simongdunham) November 3, 2014

This is an honest, not smart alecky, question: Where does the left draw the line on the question of people having the right to narrate their own experiences? And the specific case I’m thinking of is Ray Rice’s physical assault on his girlfriend, Janay Palmer. At the time of the assault, Palmer refused to press charges. When Rice was suspended by the NFL, Janay–who is now Rice’s wife–released a statement decrying the punishment and saying it was “a nightmare in itself.”

If you come from “queer” world, do you think that Janay Rice has the right to narrate her own experience and determine what has and has not been harmful? Is it wrong for police to charge Ray Rice with a crime and for the NFL to suspend him, since doing so places the verdict of a privileged white man (Roger Goodell) above the narrative experience of an African-American female (Janay Rice)? Or is there some sort of societal imperative which, in some cases, overrides the right of personal narration?

Again, I’m not trying to be snarky: I’m genuinely interested in how leftism squares a circle like this.

By the by, I’m so out of touch that I don’t fully understand what “queer” means anymore, though I have the sense that it doesn’t mean what it did five or six years ago. But I suspect that it’s not an accident that once you begin the cultural movement to decree that the self is infinitely plastic and that all society must celebrate such plasticity, that you wind up with the type of logic Grace Dunham exhibits here regarding the sanctity of personal experience. After all, if you and only you can determine what gender you are–which is a relatively objective fact–then it only makes sense that the individual should get to define much more subjective things, too. Like whether or not a certain behavior was normal, or abusive.

Had a long, occasionally schmaltzy, conversation about The Seven Deadly Virtues with my buddy Brad Jackson on the Coffee and Markets podcast this morning. You can listen (or download) it here.

Everything you ever wanted to know about The Seven Deadly Virtues.

In his column yesterday about Francis and the synod, Ross Douthat goes as close as I’ve ever seen him to taking the gloves off:

Yes, Francis has taken no formal position on the issues currently in play. But all his moves point in a pro-change direction — and it simply defies belief that men appointed by the pope would have proposed departures on controversial issues without a sense that Francis would approve.

If this is so, the synod has to be interpreted as a rebuke of the implied papal position. The pope wishes to take these steps, the synod managers suggested. Given what the church has always taught, many of the synod’s participants replied, he and we cannot.

Over all, that conservative reply has the better of the argument. Not necessarily on every issue: The church’s attitude toward gay Catholics, for instance, has often been far more punitive and hostile than the pastoral approach to heterosexuals living in what the church considers sinful situations, and there are clearly ways that the church can be more understanding of the cross carried by gay Christians.

But going beyond such a welcome to a kind of celebration of the virtues of nonmarital relationships generally, as the synod document seemed to do, might open a divide between formal teaching and real-world practice that’s too wide to be sustained. And on communion for the remarried, the stakes are not debatable at all. The Catholic Church was willing to lose the kingdom of England, and by extension the entire English-speaking world, over the principle that when a first marriage is valid a second is adulterous, a position rooted in the specific words of Jesus of Nazareth. To change on that issue, no matter how it was couched, would not be development; it would be contradiction and reversal.

SUCH a reversal would put the church on the brink of a precipice. Of course it would be welcomed by some progressive Catholics and hailed by the secular press. But it would leave many of the church’s bishops and theologians in an untenable position, and it would sow confusion among the church’s orthodox adherents — encouraging doubt and defections, apocalypticism and paranoia (remember there is another pope still living!) and eventually even a real schism.

I have yet to be persuaded that what Douthat is describing here is wrong. The only thing the schismatics would need is a legitimate pontiff to rally behind in order to claim that they were the real universal OHAI THERE PAPA BENE!

Then we’re just a Dan Brown novel away from Benedict and Francis facing off in front of the head of the Swiss Guards, both demanding that the other be locked in the scavi. Kind of like that epic scene in Crimson Tide:

Anyway, out of fantasy land and back to Douthat, who ends with something like a gentlemanly call to arms for Catholics:

Francis is charismatic, popular, widely beloved. He has, until this point, faced strong criticism only from the church’s traditionalist fringe, and managed to unite most Catholics in admiration for his ministry. There are ways that he can shape the church without calling doctrine into question, and avenues he can explore (annulment reform, in particular) that would bring more people back to the sacraments without a crisis. He can be, as he clearly wishes to be, a progressive pope, a pope of social justice — and he does not have to break the church to do it.

But if he seems to be choosing the more dangerous path — if he moves to reassign potential critics in the hierarchy, if he seems to be stacking the next synod’s ranks with supporters of a sweeping change — then conservative Catholics will need a cleareyed understanding of the situation.

They can certainly persist in the belief that God protects the church from self-contradiction. But they might want to consider the possibility that they have a role to play, and that this pope may be preserved from error only if the church itself resists him.

No strings on me, boss.

I am unbelievably excited for this, for several reasons:

* Everything in this trailer is gold. Even the Hulkbuster Iron Man armor, which I’m inclined to dislike. I always thought that gimmicked armor for Iron Man and Spidey cheapened the on-screen value of their opponents. If you can just armor up to defeat [Hulk, Thor, Electro, Rhino] then it makes the villain that mush less heavy.

* I understand that this isn’t based, completely, on Age of Ultron. Yet there are clearly some echos and Age of Ultron is the only Marvel event mini-series of the last 10 years that was any good. And it’s not just any good, it’s really good.

* Whedon is bringing two of my favorite characters, Scarlet Witch and Quiksilver, into play. Which opens up all sorts of narrative avenues. Such as . . .

* I take it you’ve read the House of M mini-series? Now that would be a sensational movie, but the problem is that it requires putting both Avengers and X-Men charaters on the screen together. Which Marvel can’t do. Yet. And it’s all motivated by Wanda Maximoff going crazy and altering reality on a global scale.

* By the by, I’d bet that , for a hot five minutes, Whedon seriously toyed with using the Ultimate universe versions of Wanda and Pietro–which had them as (vaguely?) incestuous siblings who were on the verge of getting it on in just about every panel, creeping out all the characters around them. And I’d bet that it kind of killed Whedon to realize that this just couldn’t be done in the big-screen version.

* On the question of Marvel re-unification, I’d argue that it’s inevitable. Like the division of Berlin, it’s an abomination, and nature abhores it. Eventually, the X-Men and Spidey *must* be pushed back into the Marvel cinematic universe.

That said, sometimes inevitability takes a really long time and I see no obvious pathway except for one: Marvel basically bribes Fox and Sony, simultaneously, by accepting all of the upfront costs of developing the properties while guaranteeing some large share of the profits. Basically turning Fox and Sony into rentiers. I’m sure that would *kill* Disney to do this. But Sony and Fox would be crazy to sell the rights back permanently without getting participation. These properties are almost beyond value–to Marvel.

* Interesting that Ultron seems to be neither Hank Pym’s creation, nor Jarvis–but a second Stark creation. I like that.

* I don’t believe that Whedon is omnipotent and I’d argue that he has some weaknesses as a writer, which are pretty obvious. But my confidence in his ability to have total command of this kind of material is basically 100 percent. He gets this stuff on such a deep level that I have zero concern about him getting caught in a let-down spot after The Avengers.

* How much is the IMAX / 3D ticket? $22? Here, Marvel. Have my money now. I was only keeping it warm for you, anyway.