Sex selection will lead to the next big war:

The spread of sex selection is giving rise to a generation of restless young men who will not find mates. History, biology, and sociology all suggest that these "surplus males" will generate high levels of crime and social disorder.

Independent bookstores:

Patronizing indies helps us think we are more literary or more offbeat than is often the case. There are similar phenomena in the world of indie music fans ("Top 40 has to be bad") and indie cinema, which rebels against stars and big-budget special effects. In each case the indie label is a deliberate marketing ploy to segregate, often artificially, one part of the market from the rest.

High gas prices are not changing people's behavior, in terms of how much they drive or how fast:

The federal government says that every five miles per hour you drive above 60 miles per hour is like paying an extra 20 cents a gallon for gasoline. Yet people aren't slowing down, at least in any broad sense.

Ronald Bailey talks about some of the problems with using ethanol or other biofuels. In particular:

Burning food for fuel raises some interesting moral questions in world in which 800 million people are still malnourished.

Of course, you could say the same about spending money on hybrid cars or ice cream or anything.

But don't worry, because nuclear power will solve all our energy problems.

Michael Kinsley discusses authority, obedience and defiance, and which of those is really heroic.

The chart of the day.

Andrew Sullivan defines Christianism, in analogy with Islamism. He doesn't like it:

What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left.

Ramesh Ponnuru has this reply to Sullivan, of which you should skip the first two paragraphs.

You can take the bureaucrat out of the corrupt country, but you can't take the corruption out of the bureaucrat.

When I was your age, kids had respect, and we didn't have anybody to protect us from soda and ice cream. No sir, we had to walk to school through six foot snow drifts and deal with the ice cream man.

MSG may not be so bad, after all. How else are you going to be able to experience the fifth taste?

Talent, hard work, and why soccer players are born in January:

The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born.

Americans live in an "increasingly mobile society," everyone agrees. Too bad everyone is wrong:

In 2004 less than 14 percent of U.S. residents moved—the lowest figure since the Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1948.

Again:

Never again? What nonsense. Again and again is more like it. In Darfur, we are witnessing a genocide again, and again we are witnessing ourselves witnessing it and doing nothing to stop it.

Jeff Jacoby writes about Lech Walesa, one of the heroes of the cold war.

Americans are unhealthy.

Keith Devlin talks about why it takes so long to board an airplane.

I hear only good things about microfinance programs. They may be the best tool we have in fighting global poverty.

Time has come out with their list of a hundred people who shape the world. I'll draw your attention to Mike Brown, professional planet discoverer; Nancy Cox, saving us from bird flu; Jim Yong Kim, saving us from drug-resistant tuberculosis; Jan Egeland, "the world's conscience"; Geoffrey West, the closest thing to a mathematician on the list; and Peter Akinola, the archbishop of Nigeria who

personifies the epochal change in the Christian church, namely that the leadership, influence, growth and center of gravity in Christianity is shifting from the northern hemisphere to the southern.