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Hilzoy figures out why folks are so p-oed about executive bonuses. It’s not totally about the douchebags who ran AIG into the ground (even if they were hard-working, profitable, probably actually fairly competent douchebags). It’s about the douchebags who ran the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News into the ground (and hundreds of other major businesses like it.

Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney and his two underlings both got raises and bonuses just before the company declared bankruptcy and just after the papers’ unions voted to give back raises to help keep the company solvent. They still laid off hundreds of people and even stiffed the government by failing to turn over the payroll taxes, insurance premiums, and union dues they collected from their employees.

On top of that, Tierney went batshit crazy:

According to Newspaper Guild representative Bill Ross, Tierney once shook up a management meeting by barking “I will not lose my f*cking house over this!” And Ross says a couple of people emerged from a private meeting with the CEO claiming that he’d spoken to them, in his 12th-floor office, with a baseball bat in his hands. Ross also adds that in January, Tierney took to patrolling the parking garage, watching to see what time employees were arriving to work and asking managers about those who were late. “That

Speaking of the glossy magazine effect — who in the world is working as the official or unofficial publicist for the Darwinian literary critics? There’s another write-up of this non-phenomenon, this time in Newsweek. The writer, Jeremy McCarty, is appropriately critical, which is why I’m linking to it.

But let me reiterate — this stuff is nonsense, bad science and bad aesthetics. Only about ten relatively marginal people care about it, even if one of them happens to be Arts & Letters Daily /Philosophy and Literature editor Denis Dutton. Serious research on the relationship between psychology and aesthetics could be so good. This is not serious.

Why this half-baked not-quite-research program commands so much attention in academic and popular journalism instead of any one of a dozen honestly legitimate movements in contemporary literature and language studies will forever elude me.

Paul Krugman on “the magazine cover effect“:

[W]hen you see a corporate chieftain on the cover of a glossy magazine, short the stock. Or as I once put it (I

Rents in New York are falling, and credit and other requirements are becoming less strict, even for desirable neighborhoods in Manhattan. The Times even uses the word “bubble” to describe the old world order, which suggests that it’s not just the economic downturn but a realistic reevaluation of inflated prices. We’ve noticed something similar in Philadelphia; people are offering more for less. We might even be able to live somewhere where cabs come, and good restaurants will deliver! Yay.

The story about NYC also includes what I’m pegging as a very artful non-description of a Manhattan brothel: “an acupuncture parlor down the hall that stayed open very, very late and served a male clientele.”

The last time I’d read about the university of St Andrews, it was about the boom in student applications (and admissions) from the US and other countries abroad. Now, the Herald-Tribune has a story about Louise Richardson, the new university president — St Andrews’ first female president as well as its first Catholic and first Irish president.

She’s been brought in particularly to help appeal to international students and to bring U.S.-style fundraising. The IHT story is a little weird — it nonsensically leads with a discussion of golf. Somewhat cooler are the details about Richardson’s installation – oaths and prayers in Latin, ceremonial maces, crazy regalia. If there’s a real “controversy” here, it won’t be about Richardson’s membership (or non) in golf clubs, but how she may shake up a place as thoroughgoingly traditional as St Andrews. Worth watching.

“The Craziest Space Racists Of All Time” at io9.com offers a decent overview of allegories of race and racism in science fiction — although apparently racism magically enters sci fi only when it’s conscious, explicit, and denounced — but its real value is its citation of the great Mr Show sketch “Racist in the Year 3000”:

I love Cindy Sherman, so I’m fascinated by this film; my wife thinks the whole thing is creepy. What do you think?

All you need are signficant differentials in the estate tax.

Why can’t we buy (and enterprising girls sell) Girl Scout cookies online?

I’ve reached the terrible moment. Google Reader has long since stopped telling me how many unread items I have, opting instead for the euphemistic “1000+”. I’ve dumped all the folders I’m willing to dump. I am unwilling to declare bankruptcy, but I don’t know how long I can stave off my attention creditors.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize about myself: I fully accept that there’s not a particular link in that ridiculous heap that will change my life. It’s been a while since I worried about missing a single killer post or app or XKCD or whatever; if it’s valuable enough, it’ll find me, I got it.

What I most value, and what’s most difficult to recreate outside of my RSS reader, is the exchange of perspective that erupts around a particular moment. Tim Geithner outlines a massive bailout plan, and my economists folder becomes an accessible but rigorous debate about scenarios and probabilities and consequences, light years more interesting and enlightening than a cluster of news stories. I found Jake DeSantis’ resignation letter and the attendant comments instantly fascinating as a drama about class that doesn’t quite resemble any story I remember. But the claims and counter-claims thrown about in the letter and its responses would have been impossible to untangle without the referees in my reader, who shed light even in their disagreement with each other. Atul Gawande’s broadside against solitary confinement sparked a characteristically luminous exchange between Ross and Ta-Nehisi. It’s not the Gawande piece or the DeSantis letter or the bailout story that I worry about missing, but what insights those writings touch off.

Babies won’t die if I don’t read these things. I am fully aware of all the precious, precious insight I’m forgoing to blog at this very minute. My aversion to the “Mark all as read” button is irrational; I recognize this.

But I have a proposal that could make this all a lot less difficult.

Google, I want you to give me a button labeled “Compress into diamonds.” When I click that button, spin your little algorithmic wheels and turn my reader into a personalized Memeorandum. Show me the most linked-to items in the bunch, and show me which of my feeds are linking to them. And take it a step further. You’ve got all that trends data that reflects the items I’m reading. Underneath the hood might very well be data about the links I click on in those posts. Use that information about me to compress my unread items into diamonds I will find uniquely wonderful.

The dirty little secret, Google, is that you barely even have to make this good. Even if the diamond-making algorithm is super-basic, all it needs to do is neutralize the psychological hurdle of the bankruptcy button. I just hate the very idea of clicking “Mark all as read.” Make me a cheap promise, and I will bite.