Is The New York Times celebrating the Presidents Day weekend with touchy-feely stories about Presidents and their buddies?

Wondering where I’ve been for the past two weeks? (Feel free to not answer that.) I haven’t abandoned Snarkmarket; just the opposite, in fact — I’ve been hard at work, in consultation with Robin, on a new design for the site.

We’ve tried to make a page that looks distinct, but respects its roots. We’ve been brainstorming ways to bring more attention to the ever-excellent discussion, so you’ll see some experiments in that direction in the new design. We wanted to separate some of our longer, more thoughtful discursions from our quicker pass-alongs, so we’ve given those shorter items their own look.

And there isn’t enough paisley on the Web.

But before we make the design official, we want to take some time with it, use it for a while and see what we like and don’t like, and most of all, solicit your feedback on what works and what needs work in the new layout.

We have two very similar versions of the page available for testing. When you first see the page, it will look totally janky. Click on one of the two links at the bottom of the black sidebar at right — either “change to ornate layout” or “change to simple layout” — and it will pull in one of two stylesheets.

We would love it if people would try out each one for a few days and give us their thoughts. If you bookmark the redesigned page, it should store a cookie remembering which stylesheet you viewed last time, so you don’t always have to pick one.

With your help, we’ll solidify a final layout over the next couple weeks, change over the individual pages, and take over the world continue to dish out those actually-not-that-snarky ditherings we’ve been dishing for a year and change.

Thanks, sports fans.

A more rational mind than mine would begin fearing the power of Google.

The Wikipedia Unusual Articles page is clearly the best thing ever. Look! It’s your friend and mine, Jennifer 8. Lee! Project Mohole! OS Tan!

Because I periodically like to find myself a host of excellent stuff to read in my spare time, here’s something you microscope junkies might enjoy. What follows are Web reprints of 18 of the 23 stories published in The Best American Science Writing 2004. Tell me if there are any good ones.

• Jennifer Kahn – Stripped for Parts
• John Updike – Mars is as Bright as Venus
• Oliver Morton – Strange Nuggets (well, not exactly, but close enough)
• Keay Davidson – Mapping of Cosmos Backs Big Bang Theory
• Neil DeGrasse Tyson – Gravity in Reverse
• Dennis Overbye – One Cosmic Question, Too Many Answers
• Sherwin B. Nuland – How to Grow Old
• Ian Parker – Reading Minds
• Tom Siegfried – The Science of Strategy
• Kaja Perina – Cracking the Harvard X-Files
• Tom Bissell – A Comet’s Tale: On the Science of Apocalypse
• Elizabeth Royte – Transsexual Frogs
• Susan Milius – Leashing the Rattlesnake
• Michael Benson – What Galileo Saw
• Barbara J. Becker – Celestial Spectroscopy: Making Reality Fit the Myth
• Kevin Patterson – The Patient Predator
• Michael Pollan – Cruising on the Ark of Taste
• William Langewiesche – Columbia’s Last Flight

This one’s for Robin.

The New York Times: Five Years on the Web. From January 20, 2001. Including a chat with Martin Nisenholtz and Bernard Gwertzmann (assorted NYT.com gurus), a super-fug Flash movie showing the history of the site, and a 1991 article announcing that “the development of a nationwide data network will allow personal computer users to tap sources as large as the Library of Congress or receive their own personalized electronic newspapers.”

Filed under: Traditions I love.

Every year since 1949, a mysterious man has stolen to the grave of Edgar Allen Poe on January 19 to lay down a part-empty bottle of fine cognac and a trio of roses. The man, who’s known as the “Poe Toaster,” wasn’t deterred by this year’s cold spell.

I went on a big Malcolm Gladwell kick in the beginning of January — go back and check my posts, you’ll see — ending last week with the reading of Blink, so here’s my take on the book.

I’d read several reviews before Blink came out painting it as some sort of self-help manual … How rapid cognition can work for you! (To be fair, Gladwell sort of promises this himself, in his introduction, which I think was a bad move.) Many were skeptical, like David Brooks:

My first impression of ”Blink” — in blurb-speak — was ”Fascinating! Eye-Opening! Important!” Unfortunately, my brain, like yours, has more than just a thin-slicing side. It also has that thick-slicing side. The thick-slicing side wants more than a series of remarkable anecdotes. It wants a comprehensive theory of the whole. It wants to know how all the different bits of information fit together.

That thick-slicing part of my brain wasn’t as happy with ”Blink,” especially the second time through. Gladwell never tells us how the brain performs these amazing cognitive feats; we just get the scattered byproducts of the mysterious backstage process. (There have been books by people like Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner that go deeper into the brain chemistry of it.)

The thick-slicing side isn’t even sure what this book is about. Is it about first impressions, or intuition, or that amorphous blending of ”what is” with ”what could be” that we call imagination? In some of his stories, it’s regular people who are making snap judgments; in others, it’s experts who have been through decades of formal training. In some experiments, the environment matters a great deal; in others, the setting is a psychologist’s lab. In some, the snap judgments are based on methodical reasoning — as with a scientist who has broken facial expressions into discrete parts; in others, the snap-judgment process is formless and instinctive. In some, priming is all-important; in others, priming is disregarded.

Moreover, the thick-slicing part of my brain is telling me that while it would be pleasing if we all had these supercomputers in our heads, Gladwell is overselling his case. Most of his heartwarming stories involve the lone intuitive rebel who ends up besting the formal, bureaucratic decision-making procedure. Though Gladwell describes several ways intuition can lead people astray, he doesn’t really dwell on how often that happens. But I’ve learned from other books, notably David G. Myers’s more methodical but less entertaining ”Intuition,” that there is a great body of data suggesting that formal statistical analysis is a much, much better way of predicting everything from the outcome of a football game to the course of liver disease than the intuition even of experts.

(“Thin-slicing,” by the way, is what Malcolm Gladwell calls that first instant when our brain filters in only the relevant data.)

Don’t believe the hype. Or rather, don’t believe the backlash.

Read more…

When I was in college, I used to love these two recordings by a University of Pennsylvania a cappella group — one was a cover of “Baby” by Nil Lara, the other a cover of Stevie Wonder’s version of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.” The singer, John R. Stephens, had this throaty, incredible tenor and a break in his vocal range so gorgeous it sounded almost as though it had been painted into the digital recording after the fact. You can hear a hint of the break by listening to the clip of “Baby” here. Stephens was also a marvelous arranger.

Anyway, a few days ago, I purchased an album on iTunes by a singer named John Legend. I had loved one of its songs from the radio, and after listening to the clips, it appeared the whole thing was excellent. I couldn’t get over the thought that I’d heard that voice before, so I Googled my hunch that Mr. Legend was a renamed John R. Stephens, and I was, of course, correct.

This is just a roundabout way of recommending the album, while I’m in the business of making music recommendations. The man is incredible, even if I don’t much care for his stage name.

Ruben Fleischer has a new video out, and I think it may be my favorite of his many super-excellent music videos. It’s called “Galang” (look for the link at the bottom of the page), it’s by gorgeous Sri Lankan hip-hopper M.I.A., featuring her set against the backdrop of her animated artwork. Waaaaaaay too good not to share.