Today’s New Yorker brings a sort of unclosed-circle of a Malcolm Gladwell piece, about a book, To Kill a Mockingbird, which is based loosely on events including the trial of a black man…

Gay and Straight Men Who Love Bags

Oh, so, some of the guys in this slideshow of men with man-purses are straight and some are gay…

Tom Scocca: Did you ever read that Baltimore Sun piece? About the hit-and-run?

Choire Sicha: About the 17-year-old boxer who was allegedly run down by the police, whilst on his dirtbike? Yes I did!

Here is something I have never thought before, I think: “What an excellent Modern Love column!” It’s about love, and about being modern! It lives up to its name, for once, and you should read it. Also it is by someone who is responsible, and not a victim, and…

Oh boy. My goodness. Good grief! Today at the White House press briefing: “The second announcement is the Senate Democrats will come down to the White House tomorrow and have lunch here with the President.

How bad are things out there in these trying times? So bad that extremely attractive women are forced to toil in the food service industry! New York’s Hugo Lindgren reports that where once the job of asking you how you’d like your steak prepared or whether you could be tempted…

There is a new Sharon Olds poem in today’s New Yorker! I can’t decide yet if I like it or not. For one thing it is about 100 words shorter than her normal length and for another it is a “conceit” poem (as opposed to I guess a sort of narrative poem) and this is not usually my favorite thing. And yet still maybe good!

Madonna has contributed an opinion piece to Israel’s largest newspaper on the subject of magical realism in the work of novelist David Grossman. Nah, just kidding, it’s totally about Kaballah! She’s a fan.

Were you aware that the term “class warfare” could just as easily describe attacks directed by the rich against the poor as those made by the poor against the rich? Not if you get your news from the mainstream media, according to…

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg isn’t quite sure what this poster-supposedly popping up all over the place in Los Angeles-really means, but he does hope we won’t allow ourselves to get bogged down in the idea that putting Barack Obama in whiteface might be…

Someone smarter than us noted a subtle, perhaps intentional turn of phrase in the New York Times public editor column yesterday. This column was the second whole public editor column devoted to Times TV critic…

Meanwhile, Back In Cambridge

Henry Louis Gates’ neighbors are trying to start a conversation of their own, apparently.

Today in things that might kill you: “Thousands of people have been placed under quarantine in a town in northwest China after a man died of pneumonic plague and 11 others were confirmed infected with the deadly lung infection, health authorities said.”…

The Russian Way Of Swine Flu Prevention

Russian soccer fans traveling to Wales in September for a World Cup qualifying match have…

The Rumpus asks three eminent Internetarians (I dunno) to consider the vexing problem of whether or not The Huffington Post should pay its writers. It’s complicated! (You will find a related opinion in the disclosure statement here.)

Want to advertise on this year’s Super Bowl but not sure if you can afford it? Why not make an offer to CBS and see if they bite? Ad Age reports that, rather than setting a fixed rate, “the network’s ad-sales staff has instead told…