The Metro appears to be planning the pointless search scheme I criticized three years ago and they never got around to implementing. Good thing we're not in an economic crisis where we can't afford for the government to waste a single dollar.

Long-distance relationships are bad for the environment. Of course, why stop with relationships? So are cross-country or international friendships requiring visits, or academic conferences conducted in person. So is relying on tourism instead of five-inch Internet videos of scenic vistas. If we judge matters entirely by an environmental metric, it would be reasonable to move most liberal arts and social-science Ph.D. students (not to mention their professors) out of school and into Khmer Rouge-style forestry camps planting trees. (Separately, "eating local" isn't even necessarily better for the environment.)

The real-life female ad copywriter who twitters as Betty Draper speaks out.

If I believed in hell, there would be a special level of it reserved for those who misuse "Orwellian" or other 1984 terms to describe criticism of the desire to censor. (Lately, I've been seeing it a lot among the academic ludicrous left, though I have no doubt that there are idiots on the right that misuse the term, too.) Without the hope of divine intervention, one hopes there are academic supervisors out there that are requiring the penance of hand-copying Orwell's Politics and the English Language until the lesson sinks in.

If you're the reader from Tempe who accounts for half of the hits on my blog, can you drop me a line?

I got two soundbites; when I didn't give the reporter what he wanted for his preconceived story (I disagreed that business was doing especially well in the Supreme Court), it just ended up on the cutting room floor.

I just gave an interview about the upcoming Supreme Court term which will result in a soundbite Monday morningish.

I don't understand.