Most of you have probably already caught Tom Friedman’s essay on globalization in this week’s NYT Magazine, signalling the arrival of his latest book.

But please, before you wade into Friedman prose that extends a good 15 pages beyond his usual allotted space, arm yourself with the quality snark of press critic impresario Matt Taibbi:

The hallmark of the Friedman method is a single metaphor, stretched to column length, that makes no objective sense at all and is layered with other metaphors that make still less sense. The result is a giant, gnarled mass of incoherent imagery. When you read Friedman, you are likely to encounter such creatures as the Wildebeest of Progress and the Nurse Shark of Reaction, which in paragraph one are galloping or swimming as expected, but by the conclusion of his argument are testing the waters of public opinion with human feet and toes, or flying (with fins and hooves at the controls) a policy glider without brakes that is powered by the steady wind of George Bush

Even though we’ve been on intermittent papal death watch for the past five years, and his death today has the dubious honor of being possibly the least surprising passing in the history of human mortality, the NYT managed to bollocks his obit. Classic. [ PDF evidence ]

Pastel Vespa covers Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag,” over at Copy, Right?

Remember Fahrenheit? Probably not, ’cause I think I was the only one with a mild fixation on it. Anyway, it’s now called “Indigo Prophecy” and it’s being published by Atari, not Vivendi Universal. Ostensibly coming out for the PC in June, for the PS2 and Xbox in September. [ Interviews 1 | 2 with game creator David Cage ]

Will Google never stop coming up with the goodness?? Introducing Google Gulp. That logo is hott, too.

“I know that I only knew him for a day, and much of that time I was wasted and he was a little drunk, but I do remember liking it when I looked into his eyes and I liked it when he put his hand on my back when we were in the car to make sure I was doing okay. I really liked how he held my hair back when I was throwing up.” — Buffy06, LJ Poet Laureate

A new literary magazine hopes to bring the long tail of blogging to the world of scholarly criticism. May it fare well, and may it all be much, much shorter than this ridiculous inaugural post. (Glossary: Long tail.)

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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