As a rule, I like to say that lists are a shameful practice in journalism. Sure they’ll attract readers who want to see who made the cut or didn’t but such rankings are rarely informative or fullfilling at all. They don’t serve the public in any substantial way, and often the way the...

This is a really interesting piece on Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks and her body in this week’s issue of New York magazine.  Hendricks is probably the most visible mainstream celebrity who is notable for a body that defies the twiggy, super-skinny standards of attractiveness that most of the...

The George Polk Awards for this year just came out. The list is pretty impressive, there’s been a lot of good journalism (David Grann, one of my favorite journalists out there, won the Award for Magazine Reporting for his story, Trial by Fire). One thing that strikes me from this list is that,...

Jessica Valenti, feminist blogger and writer, spoke to a crowd of excited U of M students last night. Her talking points ranged from her books, her blog to her personal beliefs, but her overall message urged us to be activist feminists. Valenti specifically championed the power of Internet activism,...

CORRECTION: This post incorrectly states that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Bill of Rights. That is incorrect. James Madison did. The editors regret this error. For some reason education is on my mind a lot recently (as you can see here).  This time around I read an interesting The New York Times magazine...

The Daily Yonder put up these sweet maps detailing dietary habits – fast food spending, meat consumption, soda intake, etc – across the country. On his blog, Ezra Klein did a cursory comparison of these maps with a map that displays obesity rates. He points out: The most interesting, perhaps, is...