slate

Image of the Week: Americans shared joy at the idea of a faithful canine sticking by George H.W. Bush’s side—and outrage when the scene got taken apart

Protection shouldn’t be a dirty word

A prominent science blogger tears the NRC apart

Prof. Pettigrew on the breastfeeding in class debate

Armando Iannucci—writer of The Thick Of It, In The Loop and Veep—talks to Slate about the lives of politicians.

Libertyville Abortion Demonstration: still my favourite YouTube video of all time. No scripted comedy will ever make me laugh as hard as the monkey-puzzle looks on the faces of anti-abortion protesters when the filmmaker hits them with the question “If abortions should be illegal, what punishment should be imposed on the women who have them?” Most if not all of the interviewees are experienced at making nuisances of themselves in the name of a grand moral cause; none, clearly, are similarly experienced at unassisted moral reflection. I will never understand how the interviewee who answers the question “It’s kinda between a woman and her God” and the one who says “I leave that to society to decide” managed not to blush to death. Most certainly they didn’t skulk off home and leave the patients of that clinic alone.

Mad Men has now officially replaced The Wire as the most footnoted and overanalyzed television show going. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Dahlia Lithwick writes the best account I’ve read yet of what Sarah Palin is all about. I especially like this fragment: “…while it’s all well and good to be mavericky with one’s policies, it’s never smart to be mavericky with one’s message.”

Jacob Weisberg on why Barack Obama should put Smart People in his cabinet:

As a general rule, media ethics debates work best in journalism schools (where they can safely and entirely be discussed in theory). But here we go.

Slate does a nice round-up of how the advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood forced the world’s biggest publisher of children’s books, Scholastic Inc., to stop selling and marketing its popular, highly skeevy Bratz series of books to school children in the U.S.  But fear not: the hypersexualized stars of Dancin’ Divas and Catwalk Cuties are still available for purchase elsewhere for all of those Pamela-Andersons-in-training.

Slate‘s Fred Kaplan wonders why the hawks are so half-hawkish: