If it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press, where newsmakers go to be grilled by one of television news's most respected figures. If moments like the above exchange between Russert and Richardson seem unhelpful—even ridiculous—to you, rest assured that Washington thinks otherwise. Tim Russert, it is said, is tough—supertough—and wily, too, like a knuckleball pitcher. As Jim Geraghty put it, "Every once in a while a Washington media institution really does matter, and Meet the Press is one of them." Why? "Because Tim Russert, without commercial interruption, will throw hardballs and curveballs for a solid half hour, and standard delaying tactics won't work." So Meet the Press thrives, delighting precisely the sort of person who doesn't realize that a hardball is a kind of ball whereas a curveball is a kind of pitch.

Actually, the balls Russert favors may be hard, but the pitches he throws aren't curveballs, which go someplace useful. They're sillyballs, which go somewhere pointless.

The Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert

In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish, even though it was obviously a dumb strategy.

The experiments involved a game that eliminated the excuses we usually have for refusing to let go. In the real world, we can always tell ourselves that it’s good to keep options open.

You don’t even know how a camera’s burst-mode flash works, but you persuade yourself to pay for the extra feature just in case. You no longer have anything in common with someone who keeps calling you, but you hate to just zap the relationship.

Your child is exhausted from after-school soccer, ballet and Chinese lessons, but you won’t let her drop the piano lessons. They could come in handy! And who knows? Maybe they will.

Why were they so attached? The players, like the parents of that overscheduled piano student, would probably say they were just trying to keep future options open. But that’s not the real reason.

Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors

Molly Young on Adderall:

"Things are different on the East Coast," I told my mother on a cellphone from the campus Starbucks, where I was conspicuously reading the New Yorker and hoping to make friends.

Kickstart My Heart | n + 1

It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules we are seeking to discover. We've been investigating the spread of obesity through a network, the spread of smoking cessation through a network, the spread of happiness through a network, the spread of loneliness through a network, the spread of altruism through a network. And we have been thinking about these kinds of things while also keeping an eye on the fact that networks do not just arise from nothing or for nothing. Very interesting rules determine their structure.

Social Networks Are Like the Eye: A Talk with Nicholas A. Christakis | Edge

We've talked about this before:

Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read. Those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject. More importantly, I am the type of person who amasses many books, on all sorts of subjects. I’m pretty sure that’s what a bookshelf is there to prove. The reading of those books is entirely incidental.

There are, it seems, people who feel stress about owning volumes they haven’t read. Evidently some of them believe a kind of statute of limitations is in effect. If you don’t expect to read something in, say, the next year, then, it is wrong to own it.

Bookshelf and Self

Book reviewing may seem in reasonable health. But the authority of critics is being undermined by a raucous blogging culture and an increasingly commercial publishing industry. Literary journalism needs to get better if it is to survive.

Critical condition, by William Skidelsky

For partnered women, a manly man with no attachments seems sexiest when she is fertile.

Fertile wives find single men sexy : Nature News

There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?

In Painful Past, Hushed Worry About Obama

In a recent story in The Nation, Chris Hayes used 2,200-plus words to argue why progressives should back Sen. Barack Obama. I’ll use only seven: Obama’s favorite TV show is “The Wire.”

Joys of 'The Wire'

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