The Metro appears to be planning the pointless search scheme I criticized three years ago and they never got around to implementing. Good thing we're not in an economic crisis where we can't afford for the government to waste a single dollar.

Long-distance relationships are bad for the environment. Of course, why stop with relationships? So are cross-country or international friendships requiring visits, or academic conferences conducted in person. So is relying on tourism instead of five-inch Internet videos of scenic vistas. If we judge matters entirely by an environmental metric, it would be reasonable to move most liberal arts and social-science Ph.D. students (not to mention their professors) out of school and into Khmer Rouge-style forestry camps planting trees. (Separately, "eating local" isn't even necessarily better for the environment.)

The real-life female ad copywriter who twitters as Betty Draper speaks out.

If I believed in hell, there would be a special level of it reserved for those who misuse "Orwellian" or other 1984 terms to describe criticism of the desire to censor. (Lately, I've been seeing it a lot among the academic ludicrous left, though I have no doubt that there are idiots on the right that misuse the term, too.) Without the hope of divine intervention, one hopes there are academic supervisors out there that are requiring the penance of hand-copying Orwell's Politics and the English Language until the lesson sinks in.

If you're the reader from Tempe who accounts for half of the hits on my blog, can you drop me a line?

I got two soundbites; when I didn't give the reporter what he wanted for his preconceived story (I disagreed that business was doing especially well in the Supreme Court), it just ended up on the cutting room floor.

I just gave an interview about the upcoming Supreme Court term which will result in a soundbite Monday morningish.

I don't understand.

Doing my part to distribute Steven Horwitz's Open Letter to the Left. If only there were a presidential candidate who would take this sort of stance.

Moral is: listen to AEI more often.

Speaking of suicidal tennis players, here's David Foster Wallace in Tennis magazine on the U.S. Open, a piece not published in either of his collections (via McSwys).

(Post updated to reflect the obvious Mountain Goats lyric. Our friends say it's darkest before the sun rises. We're pretty sure they're all wrong.)

I obviously can understand a Nevada that permits gambling, subject to some light regulation for consumer-protection purposes. My kind of government, let people choose for themselves.

I can understand the view of most states fifty years ago, outlawing all gambling. I don't agree with it, as I don't agree with most nanny-state measures, but it is a conscious and internally consistent public-policy choice, and a community can have some say over the local morality.

I'm even willing to give some slack to hypocritical states like Virginia today that outlaw all gambling, but hold a state-owned monopoly through lotteries that have far worse odds than any slot machine. Yeah, it's a tax on the stupid, but we frankly don't tax stupidity enough or we wouldn't have so much of it.

What I don't understand is the reasoning of a state that outlaws nearly all gambling--but permits pull-tab shops. Pull-tabs are indistinguishable from slot machines, except they're manual sheets of paper, sold out of bowls in dismal storefronts in strip malls. What could the legislature be thinking? "We're okay with the social costs of gambling addiction, but we don't want anybody to actually have fun while doing it"?