The RAND Corporation has released a report taking a comprehensive look at the effectiveness of US anti-drug policies. Asking, specifically, “Why do they suck so much?”

Short answer? ‘Cause we mostly apply one solution — incarceration — to a thousand different problems. But that’s not news. Here’s some stuff the RAND study points out that struck me as enlightening. (I’ve also gotta plug the Mark A. R. Kleiman book Against Excess, available in its entirety online. It was prominently cited in the RAND study, so I searched for it, and there it was.)

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This page contains the single freakiest animated gif I have ever seen. Even freakier than the bunchie.

I have long thought that casting James Van der Beek as the lead in the movie Rules of Attraction was a giant missed opportunity. The lead character is supposed to be this sardonic, aloof, drugged-out playboy lusted after by almost everyone who sees him. The creators of the movie clearly cast Van der Beek in the role to subvert the loser-ish image he’d cultivated as Dawson in the television show “Dawson’s Creek.” (Dawson was on an image-remaking kick at the moment, having just come off the hit football movie Varsity Blues.) I never believed him for a second as the protagonist of RoA.

Everyone who’s seen Cruel Intentions, Igby Goes Down, or Gosford Park knows that Ryan Phillippe exists on this earth for the sole purpose of playing that role. He’s been decent to mediocre in everything else, but I just know he would have taken that role in that movie to some unimaginable height, making it much, much more than the fun, hot trifle of a film it ended up being.

Now Hollywood’s gone and delivered Giant Missed Opportunity #2.

In June 1967, the Supreme Court handed down a hugely controversial unanimous opinion in Loving v. Virginia, forcing all the states to allow interracial marriage (at the time, 16 states banned it). That December, Hollywood came out with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

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We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

J.D. Lasica, Marc Cantor, the Internet Archive, and the folks behind Drupal have launched OurMedia.org, which they hope will become the hub of the grassroots media revolution. Robin’s already posted EPIC up there, so we know that when 2014 actually rolls around, we can look back and laugh at how far our predictions diverged from reality, as we perform remote upgrades on our Digital Consciousness servers and sip calorie-free nanolattes in massively multiplayer gridcaf

A fat girl’s rhapsody.

All right, just like last year, here’s all the 2005 National Magazine Award finalists I could find online. Excerpts or articles behind subscription walls are in brackets (I’m not sure if all the Atlantic articles I bracketed are actually behind subscription walls; but I figured it was safer to assume, so try them even if you’re not a subscriber.)

Vanity Fair was a strong contender in the awards this year, but puts none of its content online. (At least NMA-nominated columnist James Woolcott has a blog now.) If not for The New Yorker winning 10 nods and putting most of its content online, this list would be pretty useless. In fact, I didn’t include the Photo Essay category, because The New Yorker‘s entry, “Democracy 2004” by Richard Avedon, is the only one available online.

If you come across anything I missed, add it in the comments!

LEISURE INTERESTS

Golf Digest:

– The Ultimate Guide to the Ultimate Buddies Trip

National Geographic Adventure:

– [ Grail Trails ]

O, The Oprah Magazine:

– Attention Shoppers!

Runner

To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. — Slate

Adrian Holovaty, in a post about the potential role of metadata in news, advocates creating a database of isolated, metatagged facts pulled together by automated news-munching robots.

First came Dan Gillmor, putting his book We the Media online a chapter at a time and inviting his readers to participate in the book’s creation.

Now, Creative Commons mastermind Larry Lessig has taken his already-published book Code online as a wiki, and wants anyone who’s willing to help turn it into Code v. 2:

Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code

needs an update. But rather than do this alone, Professor Lessig is

using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the

creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online,

collaborative book update; a first of its kind.

Once the the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will

take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication. The

resulting book, Code v.2, will be published in late 2005 by Basic Books. All royalties, including the book advance, will be donated to Creative Commons.

Also intriguing is the platform he’s chosen for this wiki, Jotspot, which I’d never heard of before, but looks pretty cool. One hurdle for Web neophytes who want to create wikis is the bit of technical knowledge it takes to figure out how to set one up and make it all work. Jotspot boasts that it’s dispensed with those barriers to entry.

I am ever skeptical, but Jotspot’s starting off with a good, semi-high-profile project. And I’ve often wondered if wikis would become ubiquitous if the technology got a bit more democratic.

Anyway, enough of this blathering, go re-write Code!

(Oh yeah, and the collaboratively-editing-chapters thing was also done by J.D. Lasica, whose site was where I discovered this tidbit.)

Good Lord. This is so cool. (Flickr account required for full coolness. Via Collision Detection.)