Internal Monologue

"Not Dark Yet," from Time Out of Mind (1997) is one of my favorite examples of latter day Dylan. It's sad, morose, majestic, weary and dark. If you've shied away from late Dylan (and much of his post glory days work is bafflingly bad) I invite you to give this song a listen.

She: You said you worshiped me! He: I do. But I'm a polytheist. I picture this as a New Yorker cartoon.

An interesting if somewhat morbid chart . Make that very morbid. What I didn't know is what a big killer suicide is among the young.

"I recently told a friend of mine who was boldly contemplating single parenthood at the age of 49 that I thought the appropriate parent to child ratio was actually 3 to 1[...]" - Sir Charles on Cogitamus

The Bechdel Test is a heuristic for determining whether a movie has any awareness of women as people. There are three criteria a movie must meet in order to pass this test: The movie must have at least two named female characters. These two female characters must talk to each other. The conversation must be about something other than a man. Here's a video explaining the test and presenting a montage of movies that don't pass it (HT: Karawynn):

I guess we're going to find out, because he's now a lame duck senator with 8 months left in office (I don't think he can pull a Lieberman and run as an independent; Pennsylvania's laws are different). For the first time ever, we'll see how he votes and acts when he has no incentive to cater to any particular interest or voting bloc. Of course, he may still want to "play nice" with certain powers, but those powers no longer influence whether he gets to keep his job or not. [I sent this from my iPhone, so please excuse any excessive brevity or typographical errors.] --Zachary Drake

This Brad DeLong quote has been getting a lot of play on the blogs today, and rightfully so: The most astonishing and surprising thing I find about Washington DC today is the contrast in mood between DC today and what DC was thinking a generation ago, in 1983, the last time the unemployment rate was kissing 10%. Back then it was a genuine national emergency that unemployment was so high--real policies like massive monetary ease and the eruption of the Reagan deficits were put in place to reduce unemployment quickly, and everybody whose policies wouldn't have much of an effect on jobs was nevertheless claiming that their projects were the magic unemployment-reducing bullet. Today.... nobody much in DC seems to care. A decade of widening wealth inequality that has created a chattering class of reporters, pundits, and lobbyists who have no connection with mainstream America? The collapse of the union movement and thus of the political voice of America's sellers of la