As long as we're citing Slate pieces, check out this authoritative piece by Dave Cullen on the motivations of the Columbine killers (picked up by David Brooks in his NYT column earlier today). Most of what you thought you knew about the massacre is probably incorrect.

The first warning was when my noisy fan got quieter. It slowed, then restarted before I could turn around, and then stopped. I turned around, thinking I’d have to get a new one. Then I turned back and noticed that my computer had gone dead.
Once we’d ascertained that it wasn’t just the building (I thankfully had just replaced the batteries in my Walkman), I stocked up with some items from the emergency bag our firm distributed after 9/11 and walked down the stairs. All 53 floors’ worth. Descending 53 flights of stairs in 10 minutes is not the ideal form of “first exercise in ages,” and my quads are making sure it won’t be repeated anytime soon.
After reaching ground level, I rested for a few minutes (is it raining inside? Oh, that’s just perspiration) and then started off for the Upper East Side, where my friend is the assistant rabbi of a prominent synagogue. I figured he would allow me to crash at his place if I couldn’t escape Manhattan.
Once I reached the Upper East Side, I found a synagogue congregant with a working cellphone (I will not be a Sprint customer much longer) and finally reached Mrs. Manhattan, who confirmed that the express bus lines to my neighborhood were still running. As a stop was around the corner, I walked there and waited for a bus. And waited. (The buses that came were filled beyond circus-clown capacity).
After two hours, there were six of us going to the same neighborhood who were tired of waiting. We finally got a livery cab to stop and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. So I got home a little after 10:00 PM. Not too bad, all things considered.
When I first heard about the reach of the blackout, I was convinced it was terrorism. While that doesn’t appear to be the case, it was true that the atmosphere was suffused with the spirit of 9/11 – a combination of dread and industriousness. Walking from Grand Central, I immediately saw many pedestrians volunteering to direct traffic (click here for a first-hand story). I waited on the street until after 9:30 P.M., much later than I had originally intended to wait on the darkened streets. And while there was – at least initially – dread about whether or not the blackout was an act of terrorism, there was no fear of the streets. Much different than the last big NY blackout in 1977.

Listen up: I'm about to reveal a shocking secret that lawyers don't want you to know.
An article about the impending split of the prominent plaintiffs' law firm Milberg Weiss (which specializes in securities litigation) contains the following quote:

A Milberg Weiss lawyer, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said a reason for both the partner departures and the split of the firm was the obvious one: money.
"It's easier to make money with fewer lawyers," he said, "and plaintiffs' lawyers at the end of the day want to make money."

I worked for a very prominent plaintiffs' firm (specializing in mass torts) before going to law school. And nobody loves to criticize such firms more than I do. In fact, I've been known to opine that securities litigators like Milberg Weiss embody all of the social costs of ambulance chasers without any of their social benefits (though that assessment doesn't look so good in the post-Enron era). But - and it hurts my fingers to even type this - the plaintiffs' lawyers may be getting a bad rap here.
The undisputable truth is: At the end of the day, virtually all lawyers want to make money.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better go on the lam before the bar association catches me.

So you thought that just because the sun is finally out in New York for the first time in weeks, the kids should go outside to play. Well, get them inside right away and have them play more video games - and not just any games, but specifically the "first-person shooter" games parents love to hate! Their visual attention skills depend on it:

Researchers are reporting today that first-person-shooter video games — the kind that require players to kill or maim enemies or monsters that pop out of nowhere — sharply improve visual attention skills.
Experienced players of these games are 30 percent to 50 percent better than nonplayers at taking in everything that happens around them, according to the research, which appears today in the journal Nature. They identify objects in their peripheral vision, perceiving numerous objects without having to count them, switch attention rapidly and track many items at once.
Nor are players simply faster at these tasks, said Dr. Daphne Bavelier, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Rochester, who led the study. First-person action games increase the brain's capacity to spread attention over a wide range of events. Other types of action games, including those that focus on strategy or role playing, do not produce the same effect.
..."We were really surprised," Dr. Bavelier said, adding that as little as 10 hours of play substantially increased visual skills among novice players. "You get better at a lot of things, not just the game," she said.

And buried in the article is a disquieting finding about an emerging gender gap:

The professor and her student decided to study the connection between video game playing and visual attention. They carried out four experiments on undergraduates, all of them male because no female shooter game fans could be found on campus. (Emphasis added.)

Why isn't NOW agitating about this? Isn't it important to stop a gender gap from emerging between the visual attention skills of Americans? This calls for governmental action to encourage the women of America to play first-person shooter games. Which Democratic presidential candidate will show his (or her, if you count Carol Mosley-Braun) ability to design innovative, progressive reforms for the important problems affecting the lives of American women?

As Yogi Berra might have said: "If she were alive, she'd be turning over in her grave."
Apparently Steve Case is bowing to reality and leaning towards spinning off AOL, thus undoing the oh-so-successful AOL-Time Warner merger.
All together now - "Nevermind!"

Chris Suellentrop argues that with regard to space travel, we should aspire to boredom.

Columbia, Columbia, to glory rise,
The queen of the world, and the child of the skies!
Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold,
While ages on ages thy splendours unfold.
Thy reign is the last, and the noblest of time,
Most fruitful they soil, most inviting thy clime.
Let the crimes of the east ne'er encrimson thy name,
Be freedom, and science, and virtue, thy fame.

The life of a Sabbath-observer can, on Saturdays, be an isolated one - which is, of course, partially the point.
Walking through my apartment building on Saturday afternoon, I passed a woman who said, passing me by, "Everyone's in shock."
"Everyone's in shock about what?" I thought, running through a few possibilities:
1) President Bush had been assassinated,
2) Terrorists had mounted another massive attack killing untold numbers of americans, or
3) North Korea had used a nuclear weapon against Seoul.
This is one example of the post-9/11 thought process.
I ran downstairs and asked my doorman (who usually has a TV or radio at the desk) what had happened. He filled me in.
My first thought was: "What a tragedy, especially for the families and for Israel."
My second thought was: "Thank God that's all it was."
This is a second example of the post-9/11 thought process.
I realize that thought #2 sounds incredibly callous. But 9/11 raised the bar on what constitutes an overwhelming national tragedy.
For gentler expressions of similar concepts, see these items by Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds.

I hope this tragedy will serve as an impetus to rethink the principles governing our space program. Rand Simberg has some thoughts, as does James Bennet. Paul Krugman has a good overview of the cost/benefit ratios of the status quo. Charles Krauthammer proposes a new direction.
Gregg Easterbrook has one of the most anticipated pieces, in which he argues vociferously that the shuttle must be shut down. (Rand Simberg responds to his arguments here.) Easterbrook has more credibility than almost any other journalist on the subject, due to his frighteningly prescient 1980 article for the Washington Monthly about the shuttle's design flaws.

Most importantly, condolences and prayers to all the families affected by the tragedy.
Here's a link to the cover of Easterbrook's 1980 article.

And here's a link to the picture of the drawing taken by Ilan Ramon into space, a copy of one drawn by Peter Ginz, a teenaged Holocaust victim:

The latest issue of The New Yorker has a few great pieces.
First, Anthony Lane lets it rip in reviewing "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers":

Onscreen, Jackson braids the two strands together, adding the tale of fellow-hobbits Merry and Pippin, who, in a twist guaranteed to make environmentalists spill their carrot juice for joy, are literally hugged by trees. We also get ... a flawless white horse that, if you give a little whistle, gallops in from nowhere, though only in slow motion. And lo, the name of this steed is Shadowfax, or, as it was told in the olden tongue, Palmpilot.
...Gollum, who guides Frodo on his quest, is white-skinned and blue-veined, like a moldering cheese, and his shrunken frame is topped by a triangular head with protruding eyes. Think of Ross Perot after ten years on the Atkins diet, and you're almost there.
...In essence, the worthy folk of Edoras, under their king Théoden (Bernard Hill), have retreated to Helm's Deep, where they are besieged by Orcs, Uruk-hai, and other evildoers who come bearing hard consonants. It is a close and vicious fight, but at last the long vowels of Théoden and Aragorn, aided by the soft fricatives of Gandalf, carry the wordy day.

Second, Robert Sullivan has a wonderful spoof of the New York Times' weekly real estate feature "If You're Thinking of Living In...," which profiles a neighborhood in the tri-state area:

Dan and Daniella Daniels plan to retire in Hob Nob. They love their home, which they have renovated twice in the past six years—first by adding three bedrooms on the second floor, and then, last fall, by tearing down the house itself and replacing it with an apartment on the Upper West Side. "This is a wonderful place to bring up kids," said Daniella, whose children come home from boarding school in Maine during the holidays each year. "I wouldn't leave here if you paid me, which is why we don't plan on going anywhere unless we get a really good price for our house."

(Thanks to Gawker for the link.)

Finally, David Remnick has a wonderful appreciation of the retiring Vaclav Havel:

Havel is a liberal—and, unlike many American liberals, he is proud to proclaim it. As he begins to make his exit, it is worth adding up what his liberalism has wrought. He helped bring freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of commerce to his country. The Czech Republic is a member of NATO and will soon join the European Union. Czechs (Slovaks, too) travel at their pleasure. But Havel has also, unlike some other European leaders, refused to renounce, or even flinch from, the potential of power, even armed power, in the name of security and justice. His government pushed (in vain) for the West to intervene more quickly and completely in Rwanda. He pressed for armed intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. And now, in the age of stateless terrorism, he is unabashedly in favor, as he said in New York, of the principle that "evil must be confronted in its womb and, if there is no other way to do it, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force."
Among Havel's myriad achievements, one of the most lasting is that he has helped to reorder our thinking about artist-intellectuals and political influence. Who is left to prize the fevered delusions of Sartre and Pound, the selective political blindnesses of Aragon and Shaw, when there is the clear-eyed example of Havel? Who is left to question that a thinking person, profound and humane, can find a place in real politics, both in opposition and in power? Countless countries still seem doomed to autocracy without a homegrown version of its antidote. Havel's journey has shown a way out. He leaves the Castle having provided the gift of normalcy to his people, and having restored to many others the dimensions and vigor of the liberal idea.

The New York Times has been taking plenty of abuse lately for sloppy, agenda-driven news coverage. (This correction is a stunner when viewed against the original story (especially the headline), even by Times standards.)
But in the spirit of Chanuka and Thangsgiving, we should take a moment to appreciate the Times' virtues as well. Specifically, I hereby call for a one-day moratorium on NYT-bashing in the blogosphere. Any paper which publishes a lead editorial with this headline can't be all bad.

Mark Steyn is upset at the media coverage of the Washington-area sniper:

...CNN finds it easier to call Mr. Muhammad "Mr. Williams," a formulation likely to be encouraged by the guy's lawyers, once they're in place, just as, in the hands of the ever sensitive media, Abdul Hamid and Abdullah al-Muhajir were tactfully restored to their maiden names of John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla. (By the way, was that a picture of Cassius Clay on the front of the National Post last week?) My local radio news described Mr. Muhammad as "an ex-soldier" and "an African-American male." Anyone spot the missing category? You can discern the preferred narrative: an African-American male from a deprived background driven psycho by military culture. But he left the army years ago and his transformation into a killer seems to be more or less coincidental with his transformation into Mr. Muhammad.
But pay no attention to that. Even though the crime (the random murder of Americans of all types, ages, genders and races) and the accused (an anti-American Islamist) are a perfect match, the network criminologists continue to profess themselves perplexed by the apparent lack of motive, as if we'll shortly discover that Mr. Muhammad had been denied a promotion at Burger King or he'd been abused as a child. It doesn't really matter whether Muhammad al-Sniper was acting on orders or simply improvising. The jihad-inciters in the Middle East are happy with either. If anything, the freelance approach suits them better: you don't need complicated and traceable communications and wire transfers; the punks on the ground will act independently just to impress you.
The media lapsed into the same denial mode the last time a forty-year-old radical Muslim called Mohamed opened fire on U.S. soil. July the Fourth, LAX, the El Al counter, two dead. CNN and The Associated Press all but stampeded to report a "witness" who described the shooter as a fat white guy in a ponytail who kept yelling "Artie took my job." But, alas, it was -- surprise! -- a Muslim called Hesham Mohamed Modayet.

And regarding those who equate Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell et al with Islamic fundamentalists:

Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow musicals, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school.

Check out this piece from the Bellingham Herald regarding the suspicions raised by John Allen Muhammad/Williams during his stay in Washington state:

The Rev. Al Archer, director of the Lighthouse Mission where Muhammad lived off and on for months, remembers him as a guy who made a good first impression - too good.
"On the surface he was squeaky clean," Archer said. "He was almost too good to believe. I kind of quit believing."
After he got to know Muhammad better, Archer grew so suspicious of his odd behavior that he suspected him of being part of a terrorist organization, and he called the FBI. But that was in October 2001, in the aftershock of the World Trade Center massacre, and Archer doesn't think he got the feds' attention.
...Muhammad's frequent flier status seemed odd to other people. One of them was Greg Grant, a real estate agent in Bellingham who owns and manages an apartment complex about two miles south of Sumas on Highway 9. Last year, Grant said, he would often drive residents of Lighthouse Mission - including Muhammad on several occasions - to the apartments to do yard work and other chores, then back to the mission once the work was done.
Once, Muhammad told Grant that he had to travel a long distance, possibly to Jamaica or the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean, to sign some papers on a land sale, Grant said. Grant said he wondered why Muhammad would fly to do that when the job could be handled by mail.
In the post 9-11 climate, Archer felt it was worth a call to the FBI.
"I felt like he was part of an organization. I felt like he had some connection with terrorists. ... I said he's got connections somewhere with somebody who's got money," Archer remembered telling the FBI.
He also contacted Bellingham police with his concerns.
"We both agreed there was something not right, but there was nothing they could nail him with," Archer said.

I hope the authorities follow up on where a man who spent months in and out of a homeless shelter got the money for his weapon, a car and several plane flights.

Jim Henley is one of the best places to go for news & commentary on the D.C.-area sniper. He has two plausible suggestions to help identify the killer; click here and here to read them.

Congress has approved the resolution giving the President to go to war with Iraq. Here's the text of the resolution. Click here to see how your Representative voted and here to see your Senators' votes.
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste notes:

We will now observe one of those marvelous paradoxes which keep appearing in politics. Since Bush won't require UN authorization for war, he'll get it. If the bill which passed Congress had included a requirement for UN authorization, it would not have happened. Isn't political logic grand?
...[It] will be evident to the members of the Security Council that the train is going to leave the station, and they can be on it or under it. With an authorization for war not requiring UN approval in his pocket, Bush will be far less subject to attempts at extortion by the veto powers, and they will recognize that refusing authorization will only harm the UN without any commensurate benefit. UN approval will still be useful, and Bush will be willing to pay a small price to get it, but he doesn't require it and he is in a good position to negotiate.
But if Congress had required Bush to obtain UN approval, then the veto powers in the Security Council would have had him up a tree, and would have attempted to extort huge concessions in exchange for their votes.
...In another of those marvelous political paradoxes, you're now going to see a lot more cooperation internationally. Denunciations will become rare and quiet, and offers of assistance and progressively more vocal support will appear. This is a critical political event for another reason: it will deflate those around the world, especially in Europe, who had still entertained the conceit that we actually cared what they said and that they could still influence the course of events by lecturing us. By its act of ignoring international criticism and obstruction today, Congress will actually encourage more international cooperation and less criticism and obstruction.
Because there is no requirement for a coalition, there's going to be one.

IN DEFENSE OF MY PROFESSION: Catholic blogger Mark Shea publishes a letter from an attorneyarguing that the Catholic Church should be thinking more, not less, like lawyers.

THE ANACHRONISM: Writing on Pim Fortuyn, David Brooks carves up the moral fastidiousness of the press, calling it a "Victorian gentleman:"

After each event, the Victorian gent struggles to find the correct emotional response. Once the correct emotion has been discerned, it is repeated and recirculated with a pious self-assurance familiar to 19th-century drawing rooms. All data that support the correct emotion are emphasized, while all that do not are ignored.
...In the parlors of polite society, social tolerance sits side by side with multiculturalism. They are two pastries on the platter of polite opinion. But Fortuyn was socially tolerant, even libertine, and it was for that reason he felt he could not be a multiculturalist.
The Victorian gent does have a strategy when confronted with this clash of Good Opinions. Insulation. Retreat to the high-minded tolerance of your suburb and social circle, and leave it to other poor buggers to actually live with the intolerant extremists. That is to say, champion multiculturalism from the enlightened venue of leafy London or Cambridge, and force the bastards in Israel or the neighborhoods to actually confront the practical consequences of your ideas.
But Fortuyn was a nationalist. The Victorian gent disapproves of nationalism, since it is a primitive passion, like excessive religious belief. But nationalism is actually a form of unselfishness, which takes one out of one's immediate circle and induces one to love and care about one's countrymen. In America, a nation of immigrants, nationalism takes one form. In France, the land of the blood and soil patrie, nationalism takes another form. In Holland, the land of pot bars, nationalism takes another form yet, Mr. Fortuyn's.
Fortuyn forcefully confronted the great contradiction in enlightened opinion. He argued that given the realities of the situation, one had to build a wall around one's tolerance, and restrict the flow of people who refused to join the culture of openness. He proposed reducing immigration flows and stepping up assimilation programs.
One can argue about the merits of his platform. One can argue whether Islam is really as intolerant as Fortuyn made it out to be or even whether this intolerance toward homosexuality and euthanasia is a good thing. But what is interesting from our point of view is that the Victorian gent that is the Western press corps could not even allow Pim Fortuyn to exist.
With the unselfconscious instinct for self-preservation that has always been the great strength of Victorianism, whether in its original form or today, the gent had to depict Fortuyn as something other than what he was. The gent had to depict him as a cliche, a far-right bogeyman. To acknowledge the existence of the real Fortuyn would be to acknowledge the rift between tolerance and multiculturalism. To do that would be to explore what this rift means--what it means in the Middle East and at home.
That exploration is impermissible. It is beyond the bounds of polite discussion. Hence, it does not exist.
Pim Fortuyn is dead. In fact, he never existed.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned this, but while Brooks' description of the contemporary media is dead-on, his Victorian analogy is based on stereotype rather than fact. The real Victorians mixe it up in politics far more overtly and honestly. Check out this letter to Andrew Sullivan, which sets the record staright.
I've always thought the Victorians have gotten a bad intellectual and moral rap..

THE LEFT GETS A SCALP: I haven't yet written on the assassination of maverick Dutch politician
Pim Fortuyn, in large part because I never heard of him until a couple of months ago. From what I've been reading, though, I agree with Mickey Kaus that his murder is far, far more important than the mainstream U.S. papers seem to believe.
There's plenty of good stuff written about Fortuyn: Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds have plenty of items, as does - believe it or not - former MTV VJ Adam Curry, now living in Amsterdam (I think I remember his hair.) Rod Dreher also has an excellent piece on the ramifications of the killing.
One historical parallel has jumped out at me from the beginning, and not just because everything on this blog revolves around Israel: the 1995 murder of Yitzchak Rabin. I was in Israel at the time and remember the atmosphere well: Rabin's political opponents constantly delegitimized him and his positions, and either called him "traitor" or winked at those who did. Rabbis in yeshivot (including, allegedly, one in the yeshiva I was attending at the time, though I didn't know him) endorsed willful misinterpretations of old Jewish law to deem Rabin worthy of death (thus showing the greatest possible disrespect for the system to which their lives were supposedly devoted), and then were shocked, shocked when Yigal Amir took them seriously.
On the Continent, the political and media establishment desperately tried to shoehorn him into the same group as Le Pen and Haider, thus deeming him unworthy of debate. (This post is a good summary of the de-legitimizing that Fortuyn was subjected to.) The U.S. media has generally followed this pattern, for various reasons.
It appears that someone took that rhetoric seriously. I'm surprised that no one else has drawn the Rabin parallel.
Now, I don't want to go overboard in blaming the European politicians and media; the main person to blame is obviously the killer, and I don't want to diminish his responsibility in any way. But you'd think that some reassessment would be in order, and that overheated rhetoric would be toned down. Will it happen? I don't think so either.