Big Roundup of Links

Busy weekend! Almost no time for blogging. Here are a bunch of articles and other links that have piqued my interest lately:

• Jonathan Chait on conservatives' political correctness:

  Bill O'Reilly's or Tim Russert's endless invocations of their working-class backgrounds are the equivalent of the campus activist who introduces every opinion by saying "As a woman of color . . . ."

• Similarly, Paul Waldman writes on big media figures' desperate grasps at working-class credibility in "How Blue is Your Collar?"

  [quoting Michael Kinsley]...it's the only kind of snobbery with any real power in America today: reverse snobbery.

• April is National Poetry Month. At poets.org, you can sign up to get a new poem in your mailbox every day for the rest of the month.
• Here is an interesting blog on science denialism.
• A couple weeks ago Ilya Somin made his case that Warren Harding wasn't as bad as he's generally thought to be. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has a pretty good roundup of various surveys of historians and the public as to the presidents' relative merit.
• A site called The Fielding Bible has announced its awards for the best and worst fielders at each position in Major League Baseball. Read up on their interesting quantified "plus/minus" system of evaluating fielders.
• Drake Bennett writes some interesting thoughts on how we may want to re-think some of our basic economic assumptions to explain how poverty influences behavior, comparing severe poverty to being stung by a swarm of bees.
• On a site called 2 Blowhards, architects are criticized for still clinging to bad, soul-sucking, modernist "Towers in the Park" planning that was discredited back in the 1960s by Jane Jacobs.
• Leonard Pitts, Jr. notes the absurdity of the "Obama is only successful because he's black" idea.