Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aper�us, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.
. . .
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. . . .

..."BUT ROB," I intoned, "WHAT ABOUT THE TEACHERS? DO THEIR CHILDREN SIT ALONE IN THE EMPTY CLASSROOM? WHAT ABOUT THOSE WITH JOBS SO VITAL THAT INDUSTRY DEPENDS ON THEM? THE EXECUTIVES? THE CONGRESSPEOPLE? THE EROTIC DANCERS? THE GARBAGEMANS? DO WE FORCE THEIR CHILDREN INTO SERVITUDE FOR THE DAY?"

Rob scratched his dampened hair. "I think you're taking this way too seriously, which is normal for you I guess."

"AND WHAT OF THE ORPHANS? DO THEY SPEND THE DAY SITTING UPON THE GRAVES OF THEIR PARENTS, SILENTLY WEEPING AND WISHING THEY COULD BE IN THE KITCHEN OF A MCDONALDS, SIPPING STOLEN MILKYSHAKES AND EATING OF THE ILLICIT HAMBURGERS?" I made elucidating gestures with my fifth (id est, Fiercesome) tentacle....

...A brief, idiosyncratic aside (and my apologies to the reader for this perhaps unprofessional digression): There is something indistinctly sinister about the numerals 222 and 424. My journalistic skills of clarifying fail me here. They're all even numbers. Four is divisible by two. Two plus two is four. Four minus two is two.

Am I peculiar for seeing—mistakenly seeing?—some sort of sneaky, threatening code in these digits? These numbers strike me as too sure of themselves—as horribly confident as death or disease....

Run thru the fields
Knee-high grass

Chopped down to a path

That butterfly
Near your net

And the baseball diamond
Down by the lake

Snapping turtles
Under the floating docks...

...The world awaits your imminent. . . wait, that's wrong, sorry. We'll try again. The world is unaware, oblivious, to your imminent disgorgement from this year's uncomfortably distended academic gullet. That's better. Certainly more accurate, and really, oblivion is probably your best bet because we're a bit hazy about the nature of your achievement. You say: "Master of Fine Arts," we think: "Advertising." You say: "Artist," we think: "Flashing Google Graphic Creator." "Filmmaker?" "Endless, numbing, sequels." "Writer?" "Oh Christ!"

Maybe we're unfair. It isn't your fault the degree has been somewhat debased. ...

WASHINGTON – Sarah Palin's new book reprises familiar claims from the 2008 presidential campaign that haven't become any truer over time. Ignoring substantial parts of her record if not the facts, she depicts herself as a frugal traveler on the taxpayer's dime, a reformer without ties to powerful interests and a politician roguishly indifferent to high ambition.

Palin goes adrift, at times, on more contemporary issues, too. She criticizes President Barack Obama for pushing through a bailout package that actually was achieved by his Republican predecessor George W. Bush — a package she seemed to support at the time.

In what may be another small dose of that precious change we can believe in, the Obama administration is taking steps to crack down on one of the Bushies' favored tactics for politicizing government: burrowing.

In the waning days of the Bush administration, we told you about some political appointees who had landed career jobs, with civil-service protections, at their departments -- allowing them to continue to exert influence under the new government, and making them difficult to remove. In fact, the Bushies were far from the first group to try this. The Washington Monthly's Charles Peters, who has chronicled the workings of the federal government since the 1960s, used to call it the "headless nail" phenomenon.

But now the Obama administration is trying to at least make it more difficult. A recent memo from John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, announced that starting January 1, his office will have to sign off every time a political appointee who was appointed during the last 5 years is hired for a career position. Right now, OPM approval is only required during a presidential election year.

Berry wrote in his memo that political appointees can't be excluded from consideration for career jobs, but they also "must not be given preference or special advantages" -- as appears to have happened in the past.

WASHINGTON – A chagrined GOP Chairman Michael Steele has told Republican National Committee staff to immediately stop providing RNC employees with insurance for elective abortions — an option that Republicans strongly oppose as Democrats try to pass a health care overhaul bill.

"Money from our loyal donors should not be used for this purpose," Steele said in a statement late Thursday after learning of the abortion coverage from a news report. "I don't know why this policy existed in the past, but it will not exist under my administration. Consider this issue settled."

Steele instructed staff to inform the insurance carrier that the RNC wanted to opt out of elective abortion coverage, RNC spokeswoman Gail Gitcho said. She said the policy has been in effect since 1991.

This map is fascinating on a number of levels. Although the initial outbreak of H1N1 back in April was centered on Texas, California, New York, Illinois and South Carolina, the place where the flu first hit critical mass several months later was in Louisiana. It then slowly radiated its way outward to most of the neighboring states -- Maine finally hit the 5,000-point threshold just last week. There also appear to be other points from which the flu spread -- a less prominent 'epicenter', for instance, centered in Minnesota and the Dakotas. And somehow, there came to be quite a lot of flu at various points in both Alaska and Hawaii -- Hawaii's peak actually came way back in June and July, well before the one in the Deep South.

The flu has not been especially widespread in Florida, perhaps because Florida has a lot of old people and -- unlike the seasonal flu -- H1N1 has mostly attacked younger individuals. The other state which has yet to hit the 5,000-point barrier is Utah, which is somewhat culturally isolated from the rest of the country.

FORT HOOD, TX—Following Army psychologist Nidal Malik Hasan's shooting rampage on the Fort Hood military base last week that left 13 people dead and 30 others injured, fellow Muslims across the nation sent him a message today, saying "thanks a fucking bunch, asshole," to the 39-year-old killer. "Hey, great, eight years of progress right down the shitter," St. Cloud, MN resident Zahida Naseem said at one of dozens of impromptu rallies held nationwide. "And you just had to scream 'Allahu Akbar' while you did it, didn't you? May as well have put on a turban and rode a fucking camel right through the army base, you dick. Thanks for making the foreseeable future a living hell for normal, peace-loving Muslims in this country. Really appreciate it!" American Sikhs are also reportedly enraged with Hasan, and an official statement from the National Sikh Heritage Center read, in part, "look, we got nothing to do with that guy."

But deep in the bowels of the G.O.P., there are serious people having quiet conversations. The people holding these conversations created and admired Bob McDonnell’s perfectly executed Virginia gubernatorial campaign. And now as they look to the future of their party, and who might lead it in 2012, the name John Thune keeps popping up.

As you may or may not know, Thune is the junior senator from South Dakota, the man who beat Tom Daschle in an epic campaign five years ago. The first thing everybody knows about him is that he is tall (6 feet 4 inches), tanned (in a prairie, sun-chapped sort of way) and handsome (John McCain jokes that if he had Thune’s face he’d be president right now). If you wanted a Republican with the same general body type and athletic grace as Barack Obama, you’d pick Thune.

The second thing people say about him is that he is unfailingly genial, modest and nice. He grew up in Murdo, S.D., population 612. His father was a Naval aviator in World War II and a genuine war hero. He was called back home after the war to work in the family hardware store and went on to become an educator, as did his wife.
. . .
When he criticizes the Democrats, it is for mixing big government with big business: the bailouts of Wall Street, the subsidies to the big auto and energy corporations . . .

Just in time for Christmas, B&H Publishing Group has adapted The Good Book into a Xbox 360 application, a digital version of the Holman Christian Standard Bible for video game aficionados.

Entitled "Bible Navigator X," the application features the complete Old and New Testaments, a search tool, bookmarking, and adjustable settings--for big screen viewing and customizing reading themes. In early December, Xbox users can download the game in the "Indie Games" section of Xbox.com for "$5/400 Microsoft Points."

Here's more from Aaron Linne, B&H Publishing Group's executive producer of digital marketing: "The Xbox isn't just secular entertainment anymore. We can use technology that other people developed to study Scriptures through a new medium. Some people are just more comfortable with a controller in their hands than a book."

According to The Associated Press, Eric Holder will announce later today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 defendants will be brought from Guantanamo to New York to stand trial, in a real criminal court, for the crimes they are accused of committing. This is a decision I really wish I could praise, as it's clearly both politically risky and the right thing to do.

An open criminal trial under our standard system of justice, accompanied by basic precepts of due process, is exactly the just and smart means for punishing those responsible for terrorist attacks. It announces to the world, including the Muslim world, that we have enough faith in our rules of justice to apply them equally to everyone, including to Muslim radicals accused of one of the worst crimes in American history. Numerous family members of the 9/11 victims have long argued that real trials for the accused perpetrators are vital to providing real justice for what was done -- I expect to have an interview later today with one of those family members -- and holding the trial in New York, the place where 3,000 Americans died, provides particularly compelling symbolism. So this component of the Obama administration's decision, standing alone, is praiseworthy indeed.
. . .
A system of justice which accords you varying levels of due process based on the certainty that you'll get just enough to be convicted isn't a justice system at all. It's a rigged game of show trials.

Everybody is a know-it-all these days. I blame the Internet. I know a little bit about a lot of things, and I'm not afraid to step up to a microphone or keyboard and do a little "truth screaming." Audience reaction, specifically ratings, determined whether I was allowed to continue such a practice. I was held accountable by management, listeners and, most important, advertisers.

These days, a person only needs a computer to spew opinion across a variety of platforms. Healthy doses of outrage and narcissism are also helpful.

Don't get me wrong. I am also an outraged narcissist, but I had to work six-hour shifts in Bakersfield, Calif., to earn my stripes as a communicator. Nowadays, having a Twitter page qualifies a person to give commentary on CNN. I am not interested in the take of @stinky on the Fort Hood shootings or any other current events. I am watching CNN because I expect them to gather the news, not act as a clearinghouse for any bonehead with a computer, a cable modem and a half-baked opinion....

I beseech the online editors at this paper to turn off the "comments" after each article. If people have opinions about something that they've just read, let them write a letter to the editor.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

Under the bill, headed for a D.C. Council vote next month, religious organizations would not be required to perform or make space available for same-sex weddings. But they would have to obey city laws prohibiting discrimination against gay men and lesbians.

Fearful that they could be forced, among other things, to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, church officials said they would have no choice but to abandon their contracts with the city.

"If the city requires this, we can't do it," Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said Wednesday. "The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that's really a problem."
. . .
Catholic Charities, the church's social services arm, is one of dozens of nonprofit organizations that partner with the District. It serves 68,000 people in the city, including the one-third of Washington's homeless people who go to city-owned shelters managed by the church. City leaders said the church is not the dominant provider of any particular social service, but the church pointed out that it supplements funding for city programs with $10 million from its own coffers.

With payday looming tomorrow morning, employees remain on edge at The Washington Times. There's even uncertainty over whether the troubled newspaper has enough short-term cash flow to keep its operation running.

Executive Editor John Solomon is still absent. He did not return TPM's phone call seeking comment today, and hasn't been seen in the newsroom since the Sunday firings of three top executives. As we've reported, a rift in the family of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose Unification Church owns the newspaper, is driving the turmoil at the newspaper.
. . .
And just in case you've missed out on this week's drama at the Washington Times: Several executives were fired, the paper's top editor is MIA, security on management's floor was beefed up, the family that runs the church that runs the paper is a mess, staffers fear for their jobs, confusion reigns and the very survival of the paper is in question. Quite a week.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The scandal-hit liberal grass-roots group ACORN sued the U.S. government on Thursday, saying it did not have the right to cut off ACORN's federal funding because the group had not been convicted of a crime.

The U.S. Congress voted in September to cut off federal money to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), after conservative activists secretly filmed employees in several cities giving tax and housing advice to a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute.

"It's not the job of Congress to be the judge, jury, and executioner," said Jules Lobel, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the case in Brooklyn federal court.

"We have due process in this country, and our constitution forbids lawmakers from singling out a person or group for punishment without a fair investigation and trial," Lobel said.

The popular Twitter feed Sh*t My Dad Says is reportedly being developed into a sitcom for CBS.

Sh*t My Dad Says debuted on Twitter in August and has since grown into a genuine sensation, with over 700,000 people following the nuggets of oft-profane wisdom dispensed by Justin Halpern's 73-year-old father. "The baby will talk when he talks, relax," the elder Halpern said in one gem. "It ain't like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain't spitting it out."

That, apparently, is all CBS needs to make a sitcom. The network has picked up a project based on the feed (which will no doubt be relabeled to Stuff My Dad Says or something similar) being co-written by Halpern and Patrick Schumacker. David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, the creators of Will & Grace, are serving as executive producers and will supervise the writing.

Churchill's speeches, Hemingway's style and Golding's prose would not have been appreciated by a new computerised marking system used to assess A level English.

The system, which is a proposed way of marking exam papers online, found that Churchill's rousing call to "fight them on the beaches" was too repetitive, with the text using the word "upon" and "our" too frequently.

His reference to the "might of the German army" lost him marks because the computer assumed that Churchill had intended to say "might have", instead of using "might" as a noun.

Graham Herbert, deputy head of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors, said: “The computer was limited in its scope. It couldn’t cope with metaphor and didn’t understand the purpose of the speech.

Very few people in their late teens and early twenties seek justice in moderation. The hormone-soaked college years are a time of extremes, our changing identities often defined by dissent-quashing affiliations, leaving us to later cringe at our frenzied "Goldfish Liberation phase," "Castrate the Phallusocracy phase," "Noam Chomsky phase" or "Ayn Rand phase." (Yes, I spent a summer vacation trying to finish reading "Atlas Shrugged," ultimately throwing in the towel around page 75,000.)

Much like our previous chief executive, I should have seen the danger of sealing myself in an echo chamber to prevent contamination from outside viewpoints; I began only hanging out with conservative true believers, only reading conservative books, only getting my news from conservative media outlets. In order to avoid journalistic "left-wing bias," I embraced right-wing bias, foolishly confusing sensationalist entertainment with debate and truth-telling. Outrage became my drug of choice.

There was no single moment when I transformed into an unhinged, raving authoritarian; propaganda works in repetition -- in accumulation -- and worldviews rarely change overnight. However, as your skepticism weakens, a new understanding of history develops. Whereas Liberal Me viewed America improving over time with the progression of civil rights and sexual liberation, Conservative Me viewed history as an unfolding catastrophe: In my mind, "socialist" handouts threatened our laissez-faire way of life, as if public roads/schools/libraries were no different than Stalin's gulags, and hedonistic decadence -- facilitated and encouraged by scheming left-wing nihilists -- threatened individual self-control. I mistakenly came to believe that America had not progressed toward justice but fallen from grace.

MS Beluga SkySails is a German commercial container cargo ship. It is the world's first ship partially powered by a giant computer-controlled kite.

The report by the Pew Center on the States found that Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin are also at grave risk. Double-digit budget gaps, rising unemployment, high foreclosure rates and built-in budget constraints are the key reasons.

"While California often takes the spotlight, other states are facing hardships just as daunting," said Susan Urahn, managing director of the Washington, D.C.-based center. "Decisions these states make as they try to navigate the recession will play a role in how quickly the entire nation recovers."

The analysis, "Beyond California: States in Fiscal Peril," urged lawmakers and governors in those states to take quick action to head off a wider catastrophe. The 10 states account for more than one-third of the nation's population and economic output, according to the report.

Repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” will likely be included as part of next year’s Department of Defense authorization bill in both chambers of Congress, Congressman Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Wednesday.

“Military issues are always done as part of the overall authorization bill,” Frank said, insisting that this has been the strategy for overturning the policy all along. “'Don’t ask, don’t tell' was always going to be part of the military authorization.”

Frank said he has been in direct communication with the White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, and other congressional leaders about the strategy for ending the 1993 ban on gays serving openly in the military.

Even the men who hand out “nude girls direct to your room” cards stopped their hawking long enough to do some gawking at the “stripper-mobile” as it rolled down the Strip on Monday night.

It’s akin to a small U-Haul truck but with Plexiglas surrounding the brightly lit cargo area instead of walls. In the middle is a gleaming stripper pole. Swinging around the pole is a scantily clad young woman. Two of her fellow strippers are in the back of the truck too, awaiting their turns.

Puttering up and down Las Vegas Boulevard on Monday night, it was photographed by nearly everyone it pulled alongside, from CityCenter construction workers to an SUV-load of 20-somethings from Colorado.

“We are not able to cover the recent visit by a Supreme Court justice due to numerous publication constraints,” the note said. It promised “an explanation of the regrettable delay” in the next issue.

It turns out that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, widely regarded as one of the court’s most vigilant defenders of First Amendment values, had provided the newspaper, The Daltonian, with a lesson about journalistic independence. Justice Kennedy’s office had insisted on approving any article about a talk he gave to an assembly of Dalton high school students on Oct. 28.

Kathleen Arberg, the court’s public information officer, said Justice Kennedy’s office had made the request to make sure the quotations attributed to him were accurate.

The justice’s office received a draft of the proposed article on Monday and returned it to the newspaper the same day with “a couple of minor tweaks,” Ms. Arberg said. Quotations were “tidied up” to better reflect the meaning the justice had intended to convey, she said.

The Mormon church for the first time has announced its support of gay rights legislation, an endorsement that helped gain unanimous approval for Salt Lake city laws banning discrimination against gays in housing and employment.

The Utah-based church's support ahead of Tuesday night's vote came despite its steadfast opposition to gay marriage, reflected in the high-profile role it played last year in California's Proposition 8 ballot measure that barred such unions.

"The church supports these ordinances because they are fair and reasonable and do not do violence to the institution of marriage," Michael Otterson, the director of public affairs for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said.

Passage made Salt Lake City the first Utah community to prohibit bias based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Under the two new ordinances, it is illegal to fire someone from their job or evict someone from their residence because they are lesbian, bisexual, gay or transgender.

"Dollhouse" is closing its doors at Fox.

The network has canceled Joss Whedon's cult fave, which in May beat the odds with a second-season pickup despite low ratings.

The sci-fi series, which is filming episode 11, is expected to finish its 13-episode order, and Whedon is expected to give the show a proper ending.

After some dismal performance this fall, despite the ratings bumps "Dollhouse" got from DVR viewing, Fox benched the show for the November sweep after four episodes.

We were confused this morning, because Ross had clearly reported that Hasan had made contact with "people associated with Al Qaeda," and the only contacts that other reporters were confirming were with al-Awlaki, who is, as far as we know, a single person. We called Ross and asked him if there were more "people." No, he told us, his initial report was only in reference to al-Awlaki.
. . .
A strange use, indeed. How about false, too? Especially because Ross' original story did, in fact, report that al-Awliki was among the "people" Hasan was suspected of having contacted. So he reported that Hasan contacted more than one person associated with al Qaeda, and then named one person that he was suspected of contacting. What he apparently didn't bother to do was "pin his sources down" on exactly what they were saying. The result was a clear suggestion that Hasan had tried to communicate with the al Qaeda network on more than one occasion.
. . .
We asked Ross if he had tried to contact Al-Awlaki in reporting the story:

"Yes."

So you reached out to al Qaeda, then?

"To al Qaeda? No. I reached out to him. Oh. I see what you're saying."

By any measure, the Brightmoor neighborhood is one of the city’s worst. It began in the 1920s as a planned community of cheap housing for autoworkers from the South. It devolved over the years into four square miles of wasteland.

Ghetto stereotypes thrive here — broad-daylight drug dealing, pre-teen pregnancies, long-gone or never-known fathers, and houses falling apart or giving way to vacant lots. A third of its roughly 20,000 residents are under 18, and almost four out of five of them won’t graduate high school. Kids grow up here seeing failure of one kind or another everywhere.

Nine years ago, Nicole Aikens opened the school here, in the neighborhood where her family grew up, after she had grown disillusioned as a social worker.

“I felt that we weren’t helping people, that we weren’t breaking this generational poverty that goes from the mother to the children,” says Aikens, 40. “The social work field is more about handing out resources, and people knew how to play the game. What I wanted to see happen is to break that cycle.”