"I don’t think we should talk about Lincoln’s underwear..."

"It’s not appropriate for someone so iconic. Even in the bedroom, Lincoln is never shown in his pajamas. He’s in his shirt and pants....

"Middle seat gets both armrests. This way, everybody gets at least one armrest, and it best equalizes everybody's space."

"If you think that the shared armrests are for whoever first claims them — a rule that frequently would leave the middle-seater wedged ...

Did President Obama violate the precepts of etiquette and display raging narcissism at the funeral of Daniel Inouye?

It's pretty much what everyone is saying, notably Emily Yoffe at Slate (where one ordinarily expects support for the Prez). When I enco...

"Lady Jerks of 2012: A Year in Review."

Today seems to be my day for finding screwy ideas in Slate. This one seems to be a twist on the old feminist bumper sticker "Well-behav...

"Top 10 Emotional Intelligence Moments of 2012."

Some are high EQ and some are low . #6 is a fascinating low: a restaurant owner at a Romney campaign stop who suddenly wipes Romney's fa...

The real-life heroine depicted in "Zero Dark Thirty."

WaPo presents a different image: The operative, who remains undercover... has sparred with CIA colleagues over credit for the bin Laden miss...

"In South Beach, Staten Island, resident Grace Johnson clenched her fists and waved her arms in the air..."

"... as she ran toward a college student from Queens who had come to see the damage and stood across the street taking photos." ...

"When you're nice to someone else... that someone else is nice back to you, and suddenly two people feel good about themselves and each other, and spread their feelings."

Wrote Letitia Baldrige, in her "New Manners for New Times." She died on Monday, at the age of 86.

"We're so used to seeing people act under a system of government rules that it's easy to assume that without the rules..."

"... everything would descend into chaos. But perhaps free people are generally capable of acting decently on their own. Of course, tha...

"I just biked down from Hell’s Kitchen, and it is like a Friday night up there."

"And then you get down here and it is like entering a zombie movie." The dividing line in Manhattan is 25th Street. What is the ma...

"I'd rather see a movie that helps me be a nicer person, not a sharper arguer."

Writes Chip Ahoy (in the comments to the thread about the "Obama's America" movie). I thought this was a nice topic, this top...

Speaking of distractions...

... Taylor Swift showed up at a Kennedy wedding — she's dating Conor Kennedy — and was told to leave. “They texted me an hour before the...

Big UK lefty George Galloway fired for saying something about rape.

There's Todd Akin over there on the right, but the left is screwing up over rape too: Mandy Rhodes, the editor of Holyrood, said the Re...

"You could argue that men acted badly, but it’s hard to say how the women acted."

"We haven’t studied individual behavior. Women could have acted just as badly but didn’t succeed against stronger competition." It...

"Next time someone is wasting your life with their voice, any look from this rainbow of options ranging from passive-aggressive..."

"... to aggressive-aggressive will help ward them off. Some might call you insensitive or rude, but to those haters, just shoot any oth...

Romney in London.

NBC reports: Romney’s press-corps faux pas: During his meeting with Miliband, according to the pool report, Romney answered questions from ...

"I heard some Indian people eat with their hands still?"

Oprah offends. "Using our hands to eat is a well-established tradition and a fact none of us are ashamed of," blogged Rituparna Ch...

"Mr. Wizard's a Dick."

Here 's an interview with the compilers of "Mr. Wizard's a Dick," Mike Schuster and Diane Bullock: This idea was about 25 ...

On individualism, collectivism, Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Isaac Newton, and Dee Dee Ramone.

Conservatives are fond of the quote "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on...

What the comedian said when the female heckler yelled "Actually, rape jokes are never funny!"

"Wouldn't it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?...