Here is a long look at the state gay marriage votes last month, and how all four were won. The successful tactic in the field was personal appeal and one-on-one conversation: the majority of people are conflicted fence-sitters, who are likely struggling between concepts of fairness and the values they've grown up with. And it's safe to say it worked: "In Minnesota, 20 percent of Mitt Romney's supporters voted against the gay-marriage ban; in Maryland, 25 percent of Republicans voted to legalize gay marriage." And what now?

In the weeks since Election Day, the same-sex marriage campaigners have been conducting follow-up research, debriefing, and planning their next steps. [...]

• "We are a house of makers, doers, and artists. One of us is an installation artist, another is a writer and hot rock singer, one is a printmaker, one is a southern fashion designer, one does special effects makeup."

• "There is a cat you will be caring for."

• "The room is shared with a lovely young woman and as such, only females need apply."

• "Couples/420/cigarettes/drinking totally ok, but NO PETS."

• "Room DOUBLES AS A MUSIC TEACHING STUDIO from 9:30 AM – 9:00PM ON WED, THUR & FRIDAY so you would need to be out during these hours on these days."

Three whirling rockets of black smoke destroy a small and apparently chintzy pedestrian foot bridge in London, in the world's least dramatic terrorist attack, a terrorist attack on par with arsoning a Cinnabon franchise in Racine, Wisconsin, and apparently some sort of war is on. We never find out who these things/people/smoke-clouds are but one of them appears to be Helena Bonham Carter, the best Bonham since John Henry, and she is truly wonderful and apparently evil. The rest of the movie is devoted to an abstract series of nightmare impressions of adolescence. There are trains full of violence, a number of houses that burst into flames, a series [...]

"The mayor’s chief ally on the commission is Bob Welsh, known as Bicycle Bob because he spent years pedaling around town on a girls’ blue coaster bike handing out political flyers and railing against “big money interests.” During the Mariel boatlift, he met newly arrived refugees and handed them Spanish-language joke books that he had written. Bicycle Bob was elected this past February, beating Armando Oliveros, a former commissioner whose time on the dais was interrupted by a prison sentence for money laundering." —"South Miami: a city where weird things are always happening."

It's always delightful to read about places that one has no temptation to visit and will never, ever see! So today's travelogue of Kazakhstan and its 16-year-old capital, Astana, is fantastic, and as you are a subscriber to the New Yorker, you will have no problem reading it online or in the magazine, yes? Plus there are some excellent and blunt surprises—if, I suppose, corruption and horror and vast wealth going hand-in-hand are ever a surprise—mid-tale for those who are similarly and happily uninformed as I. Gosh, I hope I never live to see this frosty new hell-hole in person.

"Most of the hair that gets shorn is from men. That gets sold to chemical companies and gets reduced to an amino acid called L-cystine, which is used as a leavening agent in baking goods." —Hi, I'm trying not to throw up. Here's a great primer on Scott Carney's look at the markets for humans and their parts. Obviously the incredibly large industry of kidney-harvesting is more truly disgusting but, ack: human hair food. I guess the world isn't really quite that flat after all, since white babies are worth more in the adoption market and expensive organs in "the west" fetch next to nothing to their original owners [...]