Maybe we should apply the American Idol method to get young people interested in politics. Russia is trying it.

The symbiosis of terrorists and journalists:

More ink equals more blood, claim two economists who say that newspaper coverage of terrorist incidents leads directly to more attacks.

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church is going on this week. It's a mess. The best and most even-handed explanation of why it's a mess and what's going on was in The New Yorker a little while back; you can read it here. Ruth Gledhill is usually good, and her take is here; for the local angle, look at the Denver Post's article about the Colorado deputation.

Ronald Bailey urges you to vote for gridlock.

A possible vaccine for Alzheimer's.

Dave Eggers's piece about the peculiar American attitude toward soccer is funny, as you might expect. But what I noticed was that the picture, captioned "A German goal at the World Cup," is clearly a screen shot from a video game. Is this intentional?

String theory is so worthless that it's not even wrong.

In time for the World Cup, you can read about how Beckham actually bends it.

You actually don't have to show ID to fly on a plane.

Today I'm going to offer you a window into my blogging mind, all the difficult decisions I make in my daily effort to bring you the very best.

I often have to decide between an important boring article and a trivial fun article. For example, this takes a look at East Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and talks about the difficulty of nation-building, which is an important and relevant topic; the article is terribly boring. This "underpants manifesto", on the other hand, discusses the somewhat less important question of what kind of underwear men should wear; it is funny and easy to read.

I like math. I would like to link to good popular articles on math. I usually link to Keith Devlin's monthly column. The problem is, June's column about the beauty of calculus and the definition of the derivative is pretty bad. He's trying. He's trying really, really hard. And that may be the problem.

I have linked to several reviews of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, probably too many. Today there is a really excellent and thoughtful review by Freeman Dyson, which pulls in topics like kamikaze pilots that you wouldn't think are relevant but turn out to fit. But for some reason I have been reluctant to link this other response (pdf) to Dennett despite the fact - maybe because of the fact - that it's written by one of my heroes, Alister McGrath. At some point I should read the book myself; I've found the discussion about it fascinating.

Apparently a judge in Orlando got so fed up with two lawyers bickering that he ordered them to settle a dispute by playing "Rock, Paper, Scissors."

Auditing media predictions:

We find that the media not only fail to weed out bad ideas, but that they often favor bad ideas, especially when the truth is too messy to be packaged neatly.

GE has a cheaper way to make hydrogen.

A though-provoking op-ed from Peter Beinart:

What Truman understood — and Bush does not — is that for the United States to change the world, it must also change itself. For Cold War liberals, the struggle against communism and the struggle for civil rights were intertwined — because only by overcoming injustice at home could the U.S. inspire others to do so abroad.

Forget mosques; gyms are the real breeding ground for terror:

Today's gym culture seems like the perfect vehicle for nurturing the combination of narcissism and loathing of the masses necessary to carry out a terrorist suicide mission.

Fuel cells for your laptop.

Karl Zinsmeister defends urban sprawl and Wal-Mart, saying that both are examples of ordinary choices by ordinary people:

Economists calculate that because of its soaring efficiency, Wal-Mart singlehandedly reduced the overall cost of living in the U.S. by 3.1 percent. That amounts, on average, to $2,329 of extra cash available to every American family, every year.