I'm totally baffled by this brouhaha over the Steve Martin-Deborah Solomon discussion at the 92Y? According to the Times and others, it was a horrible nightmare and the audience is all actually getting refunds. But none of these accounts really make any sense or give any idea of what exactly was so horrible? Like this Mediaite account says: "Martin’s new novel is set inside the New York City art world, a world that he became familiar with through the years dating back to his time exploring galleries, museums, and libraries while on tour in different American cities. To Martin’s credit, he seems to know a good deal about the subject—he can even talk at length about the differences between the 'uptown' scene and the 'downtown' scene in New York." Not to be a snob or anything, but this seems like it was written by Borat. Steve Martin has been a major, major collector for ages, and kind of a weird one, collecting in weird areas across modern and pre-modern art; and I mean, he dated Cindy Sherman!; and also, you live in New York City, are you yourself unable to talk about current differences between uptown and downtown art? Anyway, maybe don't go to an event held by an art-world person in support of his book about the art world if hearing about it is apparently so bloody excruciating! (Update: This is a more helpful account, which puts the blame heavily on Solomon for largely rendering a book report.)

Tom Emmer, a Minnesota state representative who is running for governor and therefore making a lot of noise, and who formerly was a lawyer who represented insurance companies, though he also sidelined in representing police departments against all those pesky "excessive force" lawsuits that people frivolously file, and who has since created the Firearms Freedom Act, which would save Minnesotans from the federal government by protecting any guns made in the state from being registered or regulated by those fatcats in Washington, would now like to amend the state constitution. "I just don't want the government getting between my decisions with my doctors" is what he told the New York Times. But now let us read his proposed amendment. READ MORE

Recently, Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker had someone explain that if you represented the national debt as a basketball, that then the average American's income would be, in comparison, impossible to see with any microscope, no matter how powerful. Not entirely so, claims a physics dude in this week's letters to the editor! This physics dude, using an average income of $91K a year, cough, says that "the size of a grain representing the income of $91,000 is 1/493 the diameter of a nine-inch basketball, or about half a millimetre." See the above to-scale graphic, and be... reassured? Intrigued? Horrified?

There are several metrics one uses to determine the success of a new venture on the web. Page views, user retention, and brand awareness are three of the most common, but there is a lesser known, and harder to quantify, indicator that suggests a new website is coming into its own: crazy emails from random strangers. READ MORE