"Despite what some people might say you are more than just an accident of the universe – there is meaning to your existence."

I feel for Times op-ed contributor Ross Douthat—at times. He has to work extra-hard to communicate ideas about religion to atheists and Christians alike, and also to lock down his cases against hedonism and "pre-marital sex" and abortion, consulting as he does for a liberal paper in a liberal town. And as a religious person, he has to both obey and articulate his faith's professed principles of empathy, even while being a polemicist. This is a sticky situation! So it's reasonable that he sometimes succeeds at one but fails at the other.

This weekend, however, he's gone too far. He's mangled and misrepresented a major study to his own [...]

Here is a concise history of the Atlantic Yards and the development—or lack thereof!—of that side of downtown Brooklyn. Don't worry, you have plenty of time to read it, this garbage will be going on until 2037, at which time, one hopes, the seas will have risen enough that we'll have had to move on to making canals down on Wall Street.

"Required drug tests for people seeking welfare benefits ended up costing taxpayers more than it saved and failed to curb the number of prospective applicants." —Boom. Donezo. Florida's evil governor Rick Scott isn't even good at being evil.

Are you enjoying Bonus Day? (It's every New Yorker's favorite holiday, in this long stretch between Christmas and Passover.) The verdicts have been rolling in all day, as they are also rolling across the world between now and the end of the month. It's a funny thing! Remember how we used to hear about "talent retention"? That big compensation was mandatory to keep great talent at a firm (that was performing quite poorly)? That was already rich coming from a small industry that ditched of tens of thousands of staff, but it seems extra-hilarious now in the season of the wee bonus.

• Morgan Stanley: Sounds like an [...]

Science, you ungrateful, backstabbing sonofabitch! After everything I've done to get your name out there in front of the public, this is how you're going to treat me? I thought we were FRIENDS, Science! I have never felt so betrayed in my life. It's OVER.

Not just two white men are without jobs, though they're the nice anecdotal evidence for the cover of Newsweek, which announced "The Beached White Male." Oh, you do not say: "Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed." Oh but wait, do not make fun: "It might be tempting to snark at these former fat cats suffering lean times. But when Beached White Males suffer, so do their wives and children." (There are about 52 million married white men in the U.S., by the way.) But it's still safe to say this thesis doesn't have anything to do with [...]

Are you pregnant now, and in your second trimester? Then you are obviously the most selfish human in the world, and your terribleness will bring forth a child of great evil, who will shower devastation upon the country and usher in a new dark era of rising tides and a catastrophe of the climate.

Oh, wait, that was happening anyway? Cause and effect is so COMPLICATED. Sorry, no, your baby is fine! As you were! I'll buy it a nice cashmere blanket that it can barf on.

But apparently people were traipsing up and down stairs with buckets of water, people were watching their kitty cats float away, [...]

"The more you practice a lie, the better you get at it, say the results of a new study. Published Nov. 12 in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Science, the study found that, after 20 minutes of practicing their cover story, liars could respond just as quickly and easily to lies as to the truth. Moreover, they were no more likely to slip-up on falsehoods than on the truth."

Observers: Paul Ryan's convention speech last night was possibly a tad inaccurate. Will he somehow manage to get away with it? Yeah, probably.

"We have observed that when people are negative about past events in their life, they also have a pessimist or fatalistic attitude towards current events. This generates greater problems in their relationships and these people present worse quality of life indicators." —University of Granada researcher Cristián Oyanadel discusses a study showing that a negative outlook on life causes health problems and depression, which doesn't surprise me one bit, because when you think about life—that endless procession of sorrow and despair and false hope and wasted effort, the way we inexplicably raise ourselves up in the morning to put ourselves through another day of boredom at best, tragedy if [...]