This sounds like pretty big news: “NASA scientists have discovered enormous underground reservoirs of frozen water on Mars, away from its polar caps, in the latest sign that life might be sustainable on the Red planet.”

This man appears to be off his gourd.

Here we are thinking, ah, sweet relief, the election is over, and then something like this comes out:
The computer systems of both the Obama and McCain campaigns were victims of a sophisticated cyberattack by an unknown “foreign entity,” prompting a federal investigation, NEWSWEEK reports today.
At the Obama headquarters in midsummer, technology experts [...]

Via Ansible:
Michael Chabon explains the mood of the US Democratic National Convention in easy-to-understand terms as ‘like the change that might occur between the first and second volumes of some spectacular science fiction fantasy epic. / At the end of the first volume, after bitter struggle, Obama had claimed the presumptive nomination. We Fremen had [...]

“The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; [...]

Over on our front page, John Agresto, the former Coalition Provisional Authority education czar and self-described “neoconservative who’s been mugged by reality,” writes about a blossoming liberal arts school in Iraq.
And the first of Doublethink Print’s fall articles is up, too: Nicole Trafton profiles David All, a would-be conservative answer to Joe Trippi. Unless you [...]

In my earlier post I thought about calling Richard Dawkins a “pompous windbag”, but I decided calling him a “pompous fraud” did him the credit of not thinking him so stupid as to actually believe that his atheist tracts represent a sophisticated approach to the subject. Richard Dooling’s assessment of Dawkins pretty much mirrors my [...]

Matt Frost, over at the American Scene points out some useful commentary from Lee “Scratch” Perry on the financial crisis. Granted, one might want to think twice before taking economic advice from the man who boasts of burning his own studio to the ground, but let’s see what he has to say:
The money come to [...]

A new massively multiplayer strategy game, eRepublik, targets gamers who no longer have the massive amounts of time to invest (I use the term loosely) in a game but want to support some level of MMO habit. The game itself sounds like a combination of the Sims, Civilization, and Eve Online, wherein each player takes [...]

Sonny labels this Yglesias post as the single most stupid thing he’s read on the internet. And while I’ll gladly agree, Yglesias’ hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-us solution is pretty dumb, in the annals of internet stupidity, it can’t possibly beat out this.

No doubt you’ve all had some exposure to massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft—even if only through the South Park parody or from reading some New York Times piece about the latest trend in outsourcing: Chinese gold-farmers. But unless you’re already a borderline MMO addict, you probably haven’t heard of Eve Online.
The short [...]

So says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

I have to say, I found this piece on Alan Moore’s trepidation, to put it mildly, over the new Watchmen adaptation amusing. To be fair, I wouldn’t be too thrilled about the guy who directed sausage-fest 300 getting his hands on my baby, either. (As a sidenote, Victor Davis Hanson’s positive review of that film [...]

Well, the cat is out of the bag. Along with fellow Doublethink alum Peter Suderman, I’ve joined forces with several more superexcellent friends to create Culture11, your new destination for pop content, political commentary, narrative journalism, and…of course…MORE. Today’s fare, a representative sampling, includes:
Rod Dreher on the chickens taking over his life
Shawn Macomber on DNC [...]

The Verve is back. Maybe not better than ever, but still apparently pretty good, and you can’t make Urban Hymns every time, can you? Whatever this new record does, it will never — nor can anything else — resolve the essential conflict between those who rank Hymns first and those who think A Northern Soul [...]

Thru Sonny, Jamie Kirchick reminds me why Bush’s infamous size-up of Putin was such a load of bollocks:
I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul.
I suppose it’s fair enough [...]

Sonny has joined Yglesias and I in the cool kids’ version of missing Lisa Kudrow — Shirley Manson nostalgia. In other Sonny-related news, Trent Reznor looks like a combination of Jacoby Shaddix and that dude from your frat who jumped up onstage that one time at karaoke and got like three bars into “Iron Man” [...]

The dog days have rolled in, and the pantline of the professional American male has rolled up. In New York, they cavort in the streets with shorts that hit above the knee; skivvy outerwear is paired with sharp blazers and classic ties, and calf implants and hairy forelegs are ubiquitous. High rollers cross their legs [...]

Dig back through my archives to see a premonition of this piece at AlterNet, “Are Men Having an Identity Crisis?” Me then:
Seth Rogen’s chubby frat boy, Steve Carell’s needy dork bachelor, and Jason Bateman’s ambiguously aspirational young husband; for further fun you can ponder all the gay and metro [versions...].
Them now:
The overgrown frat boy whose hyper-masculine appearance and gorilla strut is [...]

As predicted, The Wackness disappoints. Reihan, on the other hand, doesn’t:
Portraying a downbeat sex-obsessed stoner is not the best way to display one’s dazzling range. Famke Janssen was wasted, which is a crime. Olivia Thirlby was certainly very convincing as a world-weary, sexually experienced teen — but this was not a film that was kind [...]