Ben Masel — the great Madison activist — has died.

Very sad. Ben Masel, prominent marijuana activist and professional rabble rouser, died Saturday from complications due to lung cancer. He wa...

"One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities, basically."

"While it may look like some domestic version of 'The Matrix' — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely sepa...

One of Qaddafi's sons was killed in a NATO airstrike that targeted Qaddafi's house.

Qaddafi and his wife were in the house at the time. ADDED: The NYT reports: “Tonight and only a short time ago, the Western crusader aggress...

"If the bunny from Donnie Darko turned into a snap dragon and opened up to reveal Mickey Rourke’s face..."

It's "Immortals," the new Tarsem Singh movie, about Theseus. I'm very resistant to seeing movies these days, but the direc...

Monkeytail beards.

Hilarious and repellent. Via ALOTT5MA , which also made look at these pictures of Adam Lambert. Try to resist.

A Drudge photo juxtaposition, presented for your intepretation.

You've got Obama, turning to his right, gleefully chomping a chocolate-dipped strawberry, with the heading "Obama Ready to Eat the ...

At the Most Difficult Café...

... you can challenge yourself or annoy everybody else.

Oh, give Romney a break. He didn't say "We're gonna lynch him."

He said "We're gonna hang him." Uh, so to speak... metaphorically...

Bad science and why we get fat.

A diavlog with Gary Taubes. And here's his book: "Why We Get Fat." And here's his NYT article: "Is Sugar Toxic?...

Mid-recount, Prosser's lead has gone from 7,316 to 13,735.

525 of 3,602 precincts have finished their work. Maybe the slower-counting precincts will trend toward Kloppenburg, but it looks pretty hop...

"In a pants-on-fire moment, the White House press office today denied anyone there had issued threats..."

"... to remove Carla Marinucci and possibly other Hearst reporters from the press pool covering the President in the Bay Area. Chronicl...

8-year-old boy in a tornado: "He said it was like he was floating in the air and then just floated back down."

The grateful dad: "I was reaching up for him, but my hands never made it. The walls crumpled like paper, and he just went with them... ...

Here comes the story of Elmer McGuirt...

Seems like a poem should be written about Elmer McGuirt.

"People are free to discriminate based on sex, religion, race, and so on in their wills..."

... but what if, instead of specifying how much specific individuals get, the will says to divide things up according to religious law? Is t...

Obama views...

... tornado destruction. And gets criticized for failing to respond to wildfire destruction.

"The truck was just cruising down the highway when he rolled up to it and pointed."

"I wasn't sure what he was gonna do until he was under it. It couldn't have been for more than a minute." Aftermath: ...

Cake...

... detail.

Think Progress says: "Storms Kill Over 250 Americans In States Represented By Climate Pollution Deniers."

What a terrible thing even to think of saying!

Of Mice and Men... and dogs.

"I'm looking for a broken dog..." Get your tickets for this play and other American Players Theater productions this summer.

“These Brats Bust Unions!”

The anti-Scott Walker sticker campaign. “You don’t have to be in Madison or NYC to participate!!... You can be anywhere where there are sto...

"This beatification is different because this pope is different."

"He’s a man with a role in history, not just in church history... The seal of sainthood doesn’t close the debate on history... In a cer...

Birtherism and racism.

John McWhorter and Glenn Loury talk it out. The diavlog begins with McWhorter asserting that birtherism is not about race:

"Leading from behind is not leading. It is abdicating. It is also an oxymoron."

"Yet a sympathetic journalist, channeling an Obama adviser, elevates it to a doctrine. The president is no doubt flattered. The rest of...

Donald Trump, redefining presidential, sublimely entertaining, or...

... fucking stupid? During a 30-minute stump speech focused mostly on foreign affairs, Trump blasted Obama's handling of Libya, Iraq, Ch...

"Why portray the king as a cross-dressing homosexual who shoots Protestants dressed as birds in his royal park for fun?"

"Because that's exactly as I saw him," answers Ken Russell, looking back 40 years at his truly outrageous film "The Devi...

"I pronounce that they be man and wife together, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

The wedding is accomplished. The bride wore a dress that had been designed by a designer. Mr. Bean was there.

“Do you want to wait this market out in your current house or do you want to wait it out in your next house?”

Are you irrationally loss averse? [M]ost of us wildly overestimate the benefits of waiting. We convince ourselves that avoiding a potential ...

"[T]he courts have no obligation to entertain pure speculation and conjecture."

Said the Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit , threatening sanctions against the plaintiffs' lawyer: [T]he appeals court said, the plain...

"Test Flags Babies With Autism, But Also Feeds False Alarms."

It's a 5-minute questionnaire, to be answered by the parents of 1-year-olds. The point would be to begin treatments earlier, when they ...

"What really struck me was how merciless they were. They really enjoyed my pain and suffering. It incited them to more violence."

The NYT interviews, Lara Logan, the CBS reporter who was sexually assaulted in Egypt on February 11th: She was ripped away from her producer...

"I don't know how anyone survived."

"We're used to tornadoes here in Tuscaloosa. It's part of growing up. But when you look at the path of destruction that's l...

Effort to recall Wisconsin State Senator Mark Miller ends... in a somewhat strange way.

There's a local effort to collect signatures, which came up little short. Those signatures could have been merged with signatures colle...

Justice Stevens: "that was the day I decided to resign... I learned giving that talk that I had a speech problem."

"That talk" = the announcement of his dissenting opinion in Citizens United , which you can listen to here . From an interview pu...

Rush Limbaugh talks about Critical Legal Studies... and Obama's legal education at Harvard.

From yesterday's show: [Obama] attended Harvard Law School at the height of something that it was promoting, education technique or a th...

"And yeah, I hear that she wants to now engage in more multidimensional storytelling."

"Versus, I guess, just the straight-on reading-into-that-teleprompter-screen storytelling. So more power to her. I wish her well with h...

"Dozens of tornadoes spawned by a powerful storm system wiped out neighborhoods across a wide swath of the South..."

"... killing at least 201 people in the deadliest outbreak in nearly 40 years... Alabama's state emergency management agency said i...

Will no one shed a tear for Jerome Corsi?

Corsi wrote the much promoted book: "Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President....

The NYT calls the "birther" issue "a baseless attack with heavy racial undertones."

The editors want to make sure you see the issue as racial: [T]he birther question was never really about citizenship; it was simply a proxy ...

"... Obama's political handlers decided to cauterize The Donald sideshow with a nifty piece of political choreography..."

"...releasing the 'long-form' birth certificate the very day Trump was wooing voters in New Hampshire." Says The Daily New...

At the Sunset Café...

... you can keep your spirits up.

"Certainly my defense of flogging is more thought experiment than policy proposal."

"I do not expect to see flogging reinstated any time soon. And deep down, I wouldn't want to see it. And yet, in the course of writ...

"When I kick the bucket... which can't be too long from now. I think I'm getting out just in time."

"Watching the news, everything seems to be in disorder. Everybody seems to be unhappy. We've lost the knack of living in the world ...

The 20 "most useless" college degrees.

According to The Daily Beast. #1 is, ironically, journalism. Actually, I think a lot of these degrees look damned useful, and I would scratc...

David Foster Wallace's marginalia-filled self-help books.

Maria Bustillos got access and reports in great detail. That Wallace even had a copy of Bradshaw On: The Family came as a great surprise ...

"The SaVE Act implicitly assumes the guilt of students accused of sexual violence or stalking and ensures that guilt is fairly easy to establish."

Writes Wendy Kaminer in The Atlantic: It requires schools to employ the lowest possible standard of proof -- a preponderance of evidence -- ...

"The White House released President Obama's original birth certificate Wednesday."

"The surprise release follows recent and sustained remarks by businessman Donald Trump, among others, that raised doubts as to whether ...

"So heavy was the defense of corporate expression in the opening stages of the argument in Sorrell v. IMS Health... that the lawyer for Vermont... obviously had to continue her argument under siege."

"Only later did it seem that some of the Justices wanted to provide some leeway for states to regulate data-mining that threatened to i...

"Without Colonel Qaddafi, she predicted, illegal immigrants from Africa would pour into Europe..."

"... Islamic radicals would establish a base on the Mediterranean’s shores, and Libyan tribes would turn their guns on one another....

If you want to live alone in Manhattan, go super-small — if you can.

Here 's how one woman lives in 90 square feet (and a block away from Central Park). It's an interesting space. I could see living (a...

"President Barack Obama will name CIA Director Leon Panetta as his nominee to succeed Robert Gates as defense secretary..."

"... Obama is considering Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, as the next possible CIA director."

Republicans Rush Limbaugh wants to see run in 2012: Allen West, Bobby Jindal, and Marco Rubio.

Blatant racial politics from the right, right?

5 reasons why Republicans don't want to run in 2012

According to the NYT blog The Caucus: 1. Biden. The idea is that Biden's too old to run in 2016, and that will make 2016 an easier year....

"New deal for bike-sharing program would cost city $1 per year."

Score 1 for Soglin. (I complained about the original deal, back here .)

"The Wisconsin State Legislature is considering a new proposal that would increase the difficulty of college students to register to vote..."

"... by requiring them to present identification with an up-to-date address on it. The plan, which according to Republicans would curb ...

Phoebe Snow...

...RIP.

$30 million in wealth, created in 3 months, with one iPhone app.

IntoNow lets people show each other what TV shows they're watching. The app reads the audio waves and knows what you're watching.

"Aflac Duck gets a Minnesota accent."

Daniel McKeague won the competition to replace Gilbert Gottfried (who got the boot for tweeting/quacking tsunami jokes). (Listen here .)

"If Mitch Daniels is going to run, he is the greatest beneficiary of Haley not running."

"If Mitch Daniels doesn’t run, it will get sprinkled across the entire campaign field."

Why King & Spalding backed out of the DOMA case.

TPM reports: Sources with knowledge of the backlash confirm that one of King & Spalding's top clients, Coca Cola, also based in Atla...

A book about what's annoying is entertaining... to people I find annoying.

Here 's a NYT review of a book called "Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us."  The review is actually annoying me, maybe beca...

The ravages of Title IX.

Read this NYT article , which has a perspective — more should be done for women — but reveals much about "roster management" that ...

At the Bird's Nest Nightclub...

... things are not necessarily what they seem. ( Enlarge .)

"This spring, Obama officials often expressed impatience with questions about theory or about the elusive quest for an Obama doctrine...."

"... Obama has emphasized bureaucratic efficiency over ideology, and approached foreign policy as if it were case law, deciding his res...

"Parents can rid campuses of communists..."

"... who cloak themselves in 'academic freedom.'"

"It hurts when I know how much authenticity and how much genuine blood is in my spirit."

Lady Gaga goes on a crying jag. Not for herself but for... everyone.

At the Trout Lily Café...

... look hard and find something new .

Haley Barbour will not run.

"For months, Mr. Barbour has been traveling to the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, testing his support a...

The Guantanamo suicides: acts of asymmetric warfare or expressions of despair?

The NYT examines the divergent characterizations.

Do I even have to say it?

I'm reading this NYRB essay by Lorrie Moore and I get to this passage: Barbara dies at fifty-five—the halfway point of the book. Meghan ...

Former Solicitor General Paul Clement quits King & Spalding over his defending the Defense of Marriage Act.

He writes: "I resign out of the firmly held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client's legal positio...

"Court refuses Virginia’s plea for fast-track review of the constitutional challenge to the new health care law."

SCOTUSblog reports: The Court’s denial of review in Virginia v. Sebelius (10-1014) was entirely expected. The Justices have the authority ...

"How law schools completely misrepresent their job numbers."

Lawprof Paul Campos in The New Republic: Until little more than a month ago, almost all 198 ABA-accredited law schools were reporting nine-m...

"If the male brain is like a single toggle switch, then the female brain is 'the cockpit of an F-1 fighter jet.'"

Typical sex nonsense , this time coming from neuroscientists who used the internet as their raw material to be analyzed. Here's the book...

At least 476 "political prisoners" escaped — through a long tunnel — from prison in Kandahar...

The NYT reports In a deft propaganda ploy, the Taliban gave a gripping description of the prison break in a statement they sent out to the n...

"TrendingRight: an automated news service that monitors social networks for the most popular conservative news."

According to the press release: " Trending Right shows the most linked conservative stories on Twitter for EACH HOUR. So, if you want...

"A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba..."

The NYT gained access through WikiLeaks. ADDED: Here 's the WaPo article on the documents — "intelligence assessments of nearly eve...

We tried to figure out what that hawk was eating.

There are close-up frames in the video in the previous post . Commenters had ideas: Rick Lee said... Mmmmm... bunny. Bruce said... The kids ...

The red tail hawk would like to dine alone.

It's evening in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, and the daffodils are in bloom. But there's a hawk, and what's he got the...

"I believe that with sufficient and efficient, sufficient and efficient use of airpower, we can bring Gadhafi to his knees. "

"It's ideal terrain and situation for doing so.  Have no doubt, though, that he and his forces are adapting to this situation by hi...

"Unclog your mind. Unclog your room."

"Arrange your room in a way you wish your mind would be."

"Y'know who'd make an awesome Easter flick about Christ's Resurrection? George Romero."

Kevin Smith dabbles in the obviousness/blasphemy that is Twitter's #HesComingToRedeemYouBarbara .

"Through... cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint 'influencers,' the people most likely to make others change their minds."

"The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future...." [A]t MIT, scientist...

"Well, if we did do it in Betty Ford then I don’t remember."

Larry Fortensky remembers. He tells of long rides on the Harley along California’s famous Pacific Coast Highway. ‘She would wear a helmet an...

In the Easter Chapel...

... you can celebrate anything.

Meade fells a tree.

"Hold It Against Me"...

... Marine version.

Once when I was a kid, my brother and I raked leaves for Uncle Henry, who then paid us $5.

I asked my father to split it for us, and he tore it in half. That made a big impression on me. That memory came back to me when I watched t...

Movies with the name of a famous person in the title where the famous person is in the movie but isn't a main character.

The famous person plays the role of himself/herself in the movie. It's not an actor playing the role (although if you can think of anyt...

The favorite childhood joke of the brain scientist who focuses on the the perception of time.

A turtle enters the sheriff's office: “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replie...

Gov. Walker's Twitter feed reminds me of "Jim's Journal."

It finally hit me when I read the governor's most recent tweet: "Haircut then went out w/Alex who is driving (he is doing well)....

Recreating an old reality show, with actors playing the parts of the real people...

... who once lived their supposedly real lives in front of the cameras. Is this something we want to watch now, or do we feel sorry for act...

"Obama Raises Celebrity Cash, But Trip Goes Off Script."

NPR reports: During a fancy breakfast at San Francisco's St. Regis Hotel, donors at one table stood up and complained in song: "We ...

Why did Caitlin Flanagan write such a poorly supported article on fraternities and rape?

And why did the Wall Street Journal publish it? Was there a whole lot more material in the original article, which was then edited down to ...

"The sound of the mountains in the 19th century."

Hazel Dickens. RIP.

Paul Krugman says "So, let’s try another shot to the head."

I realize he's talking about a misconception , and he has designated the misconception a "zombie," and according to zombie lor...

"You had a very specific vision for your work and for your life, and that vision included your death."

"It didn’t have to, but that’s how it turned out. I’m so sorry, Tim. The conversation we could have had about this crazy stunt of yours...

Krauthammer says Palin and Huckabee will probably not run for President in 2012.

And it's too early for Paul Ryan. And Trump is "a clown." Bachmann's a long shot. The serious candidates are: Romney, Ging...

If I wasn't one of the "conservative bloggers" that Kloppenburg was talking about...

... why doesn't the Kloppenburg campaign respond to my email and specify who they were? The idea that I was one of the bloggers is now ...

"MORE ON VIBRATORS, from Eugene Volokh."

Possibly the most absurd teaser ever from Instapundit. Anyway, Glenn's been going crazy with the vibrators lately. Oh, my lord, I just...