Check out an unsurprisingly good piece from Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about the development of the bete noire of good urbanites everywhere - shopping malls.

It's a wide-ranging piece, but the most interesting element is Gladwell's focus on the tax code as the unsung hero or villain of the spread of malls: apparently the accelerated depreciation schedule put into the code in the 1950s made it efficient to overbuild malls. Everything old is new again, as similar incentives in the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s contributed to overbuilding of office towers.

The story is further evidence of how small changes in, or features of, the tax code have monumental impact. Pick your favorite example: the role of the mortgage deduction in inflating the price of housing (and while I haven't seen any studies of the issue, it wouldn't shock me if the Clinton doubling of the amount of tax-free gain from the sale of a home has played a role in the housing bubble we may be facing), the quirk that exempts the donor of appreciated property from capital gains taxes, or the historical accident of exempting employers' health-insurance premiums that has helped produce (probably more than anything else) the wonderful state of health care in this country. The first example is probably the mos timportant, as it illustrates both the distortions of such tax-code changes and the diffculty of getting such quirks out once they've been absorbed into the economy (let's have a show of hands for who wants to destroy the real estate sector!). If there's a moral to the story, it's "don't go down that road." But it's a little late for that advice, so the second-best advice is probably to go to the drugstore at your friendly neighborhood mall and buy some aspirin.

I've griped a bit about the self-absorption of the baby boomer generation, but I'd never go so far as to start a blog devoted to the topic. But fortunately, not everyone has such scruples.

I hereby bring you...Boomer Deathwatch (whose tag line is "Because one day, they'll all be dead.")

If Mom & Dad are reading this: I'd never look at such a terrible, terrible site. Not too often, anyway.

Link through the non-boomer Laura _______ of Apt. 11D.

It is hard to react rationally to events such as yesterday's massacre in Spain. Rationality and morality are the two qualities that most distinguish man from beast, and those two qualities are the very ones most renounced by actions such as these. First and foremost on a global scale, the attacks were an assault on what it means to be human. And that is true regardless of whether the culprits turn out to be ETA, al-Qaeda, neither or some combination thereof. While Spain has been one of America's foremost allies in the war on terrorism (a competition that unfortunately is not as tough as it should be), the meaning of the massacre would be true even if that were not the case. Ultimately, searching for the "reason" behind the attacks, or behind the choice of targets, is the very definition of pointlessness. For reason is nowhere to be found except in the struggle against such events, and their perpetrators. The war on terrorism is not a "clash of civilizations;" it is a clash between civilization and barbarism, between humanism and nihilism. The existentalists could only dream of something so meaningful (it is no wonder their intellectual descendants are disproportionally on the wrong side of this struggle).

As today's NYT editorial states: "We are all Madrileņos now." To be human, we have little choice.

Check out this feature on great old-time catcher and manager Al Lopez, still going strong at age 95.

Honestly, I had always assumed he was no longer alive. It's too bad he apparently dislikes giving interviews; wouldn't it be great to hear him reminisce more often about catching Walter Johnson ? Kudos to Bill Madden for the catch.

Then check out the revived Protein Wisdom blog, whose short break from August of 2002 ended last week. There's a reason I never delete a blog from the sidebar. It's like the CIA - nobody ever really leaves.

Avraham Bronstein provides an awesome example. I'm a sucker for great Purim Torah (Eli Clark-style), and this sounds almost realistic enough to be real. You don't have to drink too much to reach the level of ad de'-lo yada, if the issue is distinguishing between reality and satire.