Don! Since the beginning of "Mad Men," all have been agog about Don Draper's magnetism. What is it? Why do women wilt and men follow? How does his staff endure his endless floggings? (Ahem.) And how does he turn the most banal products into objects of desire? Granddaddy sociologist Max Weber provides an answer: Don is a charismatic. Charismatics draw their power from the mystic and divine. For the early Christians, a charismatic was a human vessel through which a god revealed its power. Charismatics are theatrical, eloquent, and fervent. We first saw a glimpse of Don's supernatural power when he coolly walked around a conference table of skeptical [...]

"I don't know whether it is just growing up or whether it's geography, but neither Tacoma, WA, nor New York, NY has been big on kegs (in my experience). New York kind of makes sense. After all, where would anyone store kegs? They're quite bulky. Still. As dumb as it will obviously sound, I think the keg is a great social apparatus, and I miss it, particularly because it doesn't seem like people are any less into drinking now than they were when kegs played a bigger part in my life. Kegs are in some ways more fun from an objective standpoint, and are almost always less expensive than their [...]

Rest easy, America! After our long march through the spiritless battle to prop up our inflammable paper economy, David Brooks has identified the true cause of our distemper: we have been lulled into a terminal state of civic distrust by an overly porous power elite.

Yes. The recruitment of our upper-class leaders has become more demographically open, Brooks notes, with the old WASP establishment giving way to a "meritocratic" scrum of other-than white male power brokers. And as a result, "we've changed the criteria for success. It is less important to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working." But there's a twist! "As [...]