Tyler Cowen muses: [R]aising children is the main thing that goes on in a marriage, yet few of us choose life partners on that basis. The film [Knocked Up] suggests that a random allocation might be better than selecting a partner on the grounds of smarts, common interests, attractiveness, how good he or she makes […]

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HT: Boing Boing.

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The music industry’s international trade group, IFPI, has just released a list of ten “inconvenient truths” about file sharing, and as Ars Technica’s analysis notes, it’s just kind of amateurish and embarrassing. It reads like a whiny Usenet flame, and alternates between the true-but-uninteresting and the massively unpersuasive. As with Paris Hilton at the MTV […]

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I’m back from the beach, and not a moment too soon to judge by the Noachian blanket that’s fallen over the eastern seaboard. Among the more sober diversions of the week away, we all got a fair amount of reading done. I made use of the first days to tackle John Barth’s Lost in the […]

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Ryan Singel reports that the Society for Professional Journalists is using distributed journalism to uncover the identity of the senator who’s placed a secret hold on a bill to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act.

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This sounds like a fun project: A blogger is encouraging people to take a photo of whatever they’re doing at precisely 2 p.m. Eastern Time this Sunday (June 2) and then email them to him, to be posted as a kind of global snapshot of that minute.

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Because Ezra and Ygz are inebriated enough that they think it’s a good idea to post this, a little Vertical Horizon in the style of liberal bloggers, almost-live from the Outer Banks:

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