Slate has polled all its staff about how they will vote:

Barack Obama: 55
John McCain: 1
Bob Barr: 1
Not McCain: 1
Noncitizen, can't vote: 4

Of course it doesn't matter:

But—for the millionth time!—an opinion is not a bias! The fact that reporters tend to be liberal says nothing one way or another about their tendency to be biased.

Says nothing one way or another? Are they actually serious?

But I'm glad they're transparent about it and actually do this poll. They encourage other news organizations and commentators to do the same. So here it is, the Evil Line staff poll:

I voted to remove Judge James Klein.

Nick Mamatas used to write term papers for extra cash:

Six pages by 6 a.m. — the kid needs three hours to rewrite and hand in the paper by 9 or he won't graduate. "Cool," I'd say. "A hundred bucks a page." I'd get it, too, and when I didn't get it, I slept well anyway.

This piece is both very entertaining and very depressing.

Paul Bloom on personality and morality:

The iconic image, from a million movies and cartoons, is of a person with an angel over one shoulder and the devil over the other.

The alternative view keeps the angel and the devil, but casts aside the person in between. The competing selves are not over your shoulder, but inside your head: the angel and the devil, the self who wants to be slim and the one who wants to eat the cake, all exist within one person.

This pull quote chosen from many good ones in the article because it echoes the quote at the top of this blog.

I hate PowerPoint, so I really wanted to link this essay. Unforunately, it's half a rant about how kids these days are stupid and should get off my lawn and half a description of how deep, inspiring humanities are better than soulless sciences.

You're better off reading this old but still relevant article, titled "PowerPoint is Evil":

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

Jeffrey Greenberg loads his carry-on bag with some liquids, boxcutters, a Hezbollah flag, and terrorist propaganda. Then he meets a collaborator who provides him with a forged boarding pass at the airport Starbucks:

He had taken the liberty of upgrading us to first class, and had even granted me “Platinum/Elite Plus” status, which was gracious of him. This status would allow us to skip the ranks of hoi-polloi flyers and join the expedited line, which is my preference, because those knotty, teeming security lines are the most dangerous places in airports: terrorists could paralyze U.S. aviation merely by detonating a bomb at any security checkpoint, all of which are, of course, entirely unsecured.

The collaborator, predictably, is Bruce Schneier. Even more predictably, he gets through security with no problem, despite declining to show ID.

It's local, it's about beer, it's about religion. What's not to like in this article?

Clay Risen, in an interesting article about the most important person in American education:

Behind the fighting lie basic questions: What makes a good teacher? And how do you recognize one? For Rhee and her fellow reformers, the answer is data. Lots of data. There may be many unquantifiables in teacher quality, but most of the traits that matter to reformers can be put into numbers.

I think she's right, but even if Michelle Rhee is on the wrong track, we still need lots of people like her. One of them will stumble on something that works.

Alan Jacobs writes about Mountains Beyond Mountains (which is a great book), and the idea of the "long defeat".

The expectation of victory can be a terrible thing — it can raise hopes in (relatively) good times only to shatter them when the inevitable downturn comes. Conversely, the one who fights the long defeat can be all the more thankful for victories, even small ones.

Voter registration drives are a fraud:

Having students learn more is a legitimate interest of schools, and if students learn more they should get better grades. But it is a fraud for schools to raise student grades when they have not actually learned more. Similarly, it might be good things if citizens were better informed and considered their political process legitimate, and these good things might show themselves via more votes. But just pushing more people to vote, without their actually becoming more informed or considering the process more legitimate, is also a fraud.

I react pretty strongly to this kind of thinking, where the underlying reasoning seems to be "everybody but me and my friends is stupid."

The future of NASCAR:

As the fans join in a full-throated cheer, 43 of the world's best drivers reach down and press a button. What follows is unprecedented: pin-dropping silence, save for 43 small clicks.

With any luck, the electricity will come from clean, safe, efficient nuclear power.

Survive the meltdown by living in a smaller house:

Homes 1200 square feet or smaller lost just one percent of their value over the previous year, compared to 3.1 percent losses for midsized houses and 2.8 percent losses for large homes.

A clever thief hires accomplices on Craigslist. The beautiful thing is, he doesn't even need to pay them. The really beautiful thing is, his getaway vehicle was an inner tube.

Sometimes I crack open the Wall Street Journal and am amused to find that some copy editor has decided to insert the word "mackerel" at random points in the story:

There's been a mackerel economy in federal prisons since about 2004, former inmates and some prison consultants say...

Current inmates can't discuss mackerel transactions without risking discipline, say several lawyers and consultants who represent incarcerated clients...

Ethan Roberts knows about mackerel discipline first hand...

At Lompoc, says spokeswoman Katie Shinn, guards "are not aware of such a problem with mackerel."

Then I find out it's not a mistake. This is actually an interesting article.